AND NOW DOTH TIME WASTE ME

GEORGE TURNER

George Turner was an important Australian mainstream author, who won the Miles Franklin Award in 1963 and the Commonwealth Literary Fund Award in 1968. His mainstream titles include Young Man of Talent, A Stranger and Afraid, The Cupboard under the Stairs, A Waste of Shame, The Lame Dog Man, and Transit of Cassidy. He began writing science fiction criticism in the 70s (he was a very perceptive and demanding critic), and then he turned his hand to writing the science fiction novels, which gained him international critical acclaim, a Ditmar Award, and the Arthur C. Clark Award. He became a major voice in the science fiction genre and has been compared with another philosophically rigorous polymath: Stanislaw Lem. His science fiction novels include Beloved Son, Vaneglory: A Science Fiction Novel, Yesterday’s Men, The Sea and Summer, Brain Child, The Destiny Makers, and Genetic Soldier. Some of his stories can be found in the collection A Pursuit of Miracles. He also wrote an autobiography (In the Heart or in the Head: An Essay in Time Travel), a memoir (Off-Cuts), and edited the anthology The View from the Edge: A Workshop of Science Fiction Stories. Since 1970, he had been the science fiction reviewer for the Melbourne Age.

Sadly, George Turner died of a stroke on June 8, 1997.

He had been working on a story for Dreaming Down-Under, and every few weeks your editors would call and pester him for the story, and he would say, “I’m working on it … it’s coming along”. Well, the short story had turned into a novelette and then into a novella and was well on its way to becoming a novel when George died. When Bruce Gillespie, George’s executor, sent us “And Now Doth Time Waste Me,” we could immediately see that this was major work … this was Turner at the top of his form.

We believe that this is George Turner’s “unfinished symphony” and should be presented as such. In fact, George has bequeathed us a puzzle, and your editors found themselves trying to solve it. We’re betting that you’ll enjoy becoming a part of this story, as we did … becoming, in effect, collaborators with George.

We asked Bruce Gillespie and Judith Raphael Buckrich, George’s authorised biographer, to offer some insights into how George worked and where he might have taken this brilliant piece of work. Their short essays follow the story.

But before we give you over to Turner’s sad, unsettling reflection on eternal life, we quote from a letter we received from George’s friend and literary agent, Cherry Weiner. It warmed us to read how vigorous George was right to the end, and that we made some small difference…

“I have been honored to meet with George Turner once a year since I took him on as a client. Until his stroke, I had never seen him disappointed or tentative about his writing ability. His stroke did that to him. For over a year he had complained to me that he had no new ideas and didn’t know what to write about … or if he ever would again. Jack Dann, Janeen Webb, and the anthology Dreaming Down-Under changed that. When I saw George in May of 1997, three weeks before he died, he was excited. He was gregarious. He was having trouble doing the short story because it was turning into a novel. Those words were the sweetest I had heard this trip. We spent a good two hours talking about the compression of the novel into the short story Jack and Janeen wanted … and the expansion of the story into the novel he, George, wanted. I don’t think I have ever, over the years, seen George so happy.”

With that, we bid you farewell, George…

I have wasted time,

And now doth time waste me.

— Shakespeare, Richard III

1

(I)

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The boy insisted, “But I seen ‘im! I seen the witch and I seen ‘im go down under.”

The big copper winked at the thin copper and said, “There’s no such thing as witches, boy. You saw some crazy old girl dancing around.”

The kid held his ground. No more than ten or eleven, he was a sturdy little streetswiper who had learned early to steal and run with the sewer packrats; he held police in patient but wary contempt. “It was the man I seen. And everybody says they’s witches. And I seen ‘im go down under. And I follered ‘im to see where ‘e lived. An’ then I see —”

The big copper interrupted him, “Yes, you said what you thought you saw. But you were scared stiff and not seeing straight.”

The kid knew you had to be patient with coppers because they always thought kids were silly, fancying they saw things. “I seen where ‘e went an’ the woman witch was in there too, an’ there was this smell. And ‘e seen me lookin’ an’ ‘e started after me but ‘e fell over an’ I run like ‘ot shit —”

The thin copper asked then, “Why have you come to us?” Because he knew the packrats didn’t go to coppers, not for anything. But this kid had had a scare of some sort.

“So you can get ‘em off our patch! We don’t like witches. You make ‘em go an’ leave us alone. Besides, she stinks.”

The thin copper said, “We ought to have a look, Joe.”

Joe didn’t like it but he wasn’t going to admit he was nervous of the down under and packrats; the kid could see it in his face. But when his mate said the obvious he didn’t have much choice.

So here they were, underground on the narrow walkway with the magnetic suspension trains whiffling past and the wind of their passage making the men hold to the guard rails while the kid trotted freely on familiar territory. Until they came to the workspace …

… and the thin copper looked in and said, “Oh, Jesus Christ!”

Must be one of them Godwallopers, the kid thought. Cops ought to be tougher than that. He had told the silly buggers what to expect, hadn’t he?

What the thin copper, Constable Andy Phillips, saw was the inside of a crashpad. Crashpads had been excavated from the tunnel walls in the early days of magnetic suspension transport, maybe a hundred or more years ago, when there were still glitches in the system with occasional breakdowns, even a crash or two, and space was needed for storage of emergency ambulance supplies and repair tools. It ran about six metres into the tunnel wall but now it was empty of tools and supplies in this era of super-efficient robot-handling from a distance, empty of everything but the witches.

Phillips, after his exclamation of shock, steadied his vision of the two skeletal, starvation-thinned forms. His next perception was that the woman was asleep, lying relaxed on her back, and that the man was mad.

The man crouched against the rear wall as if he would force a way through it, watching over his shoulder with insanely terrified eyes as Phillips moved cautiously towards him. Now the policeman realised the presence of charnel house blood over the floor, dried and blackening, and the sweetish smell, not yet quite a stench, of the woman’s body not asleep but in incipient decay. His fellow constable, Allenby, was already on the intercom, stuttering and gagging on the smell.

The witch man ceased his scrabbling at the wall and sat down against it. The crazy stare died out of his eyes and became servile with eager friendliness, as though the police were guests, unexpected but welcome in the home.

Phillips bent over the woman under the blanket, taking in the terminal gash in her throat; he had never seen a cut like it — literally from ear to ear. Slowly he eased back the blanket, sickly registering her nakedness and the mutilations from which blood had flooded over the crashpad floor. So much blood …

The witch said, confidingly, in the rounded, clear tones of the wealthy classes, “It was, after all, necessary.” He peered intently at the petrified Phillips. “Surely you see that.”

The boy, who had crept in, wide-eyed, behind the copper, retreated on the run. The wind of a passing train splashed the shreds of his vomit on the tunnel wall.

(II)

In the canteen the coppers refused to be impressed by the story; they had all confronted equal eeriness in some duty shift in the ratpack corridors. The paunchy Sergeant said, “Bloody witches! You’d think even the shitlickers would’ve grown out of baby tales by now.”

Phillips said, “They’re shut out from decent life so they invent fantasies to explain even the simplest mystery. Some of the religions in the corridors are full of spells and visitations.”

The squad coppers tended to listen to Phillips. He was a book reader in an only functionally literate social stratum, in the eyes of his peers something of an intellectual who would go far in his profession. He knew a thing or two, they said to each other, and the Sergeant consequently hated his guts.

The Sergeant asked, with scorn, “So what did they do to get them kicked out of the corridors? Turn somebody’s milk sour? Raise warts on a baby’s bum?”

“Better than that,” Phillips said. “They stayed young. I asked the kid about it and he said they were really old, that some people remembered them from thirty years ago and said they hadn’t aged at all.”

“Juvenation job.” The Sergeant was dismissive. “You say the bloke’s got a posh accent. So he’s a moneyboy who had an illegal juve job and then went broke and finished up in the corridors.”

Part of Phillip’s prestige among his fellows derived from his persistent talking back to the Sergeant. “You ever seen a juve job, Sergeant? It takes twenty years off them, but in twenty years they put it back on like anybody else. The story is that they’ve stayed the same, haven’t changed at all.”

Someone asked, “How old is the bloke?”

“I’d say about twenty-five.”

The Sergeant snorted, “It’ll all turn out to be a load of shit.”

(III)

A number of people were already less sure of that. After Constable Allenby’s scarcely coherent verbal report had been smoothed and rendered intelligible by his junior patrol mate, Constable Phillips, and the sickening mutilations had been spelled out, the Station Manager had simply asked, in outraged puzzlement, “But why?”

It was a reasonable question. The corridor people, who comprised some thirty percent of the city’s population, were ferocious, combative, thieving, and incredibly superstitious, but not given to outrage on the bodies of the dead.

Of course, insane! The SM demanded to be taken to see the prisoner and the body. Aside from their starved condition — their bones seemed about to penetrate the flesh — he saw that the woman had been sickeningly attacked, stripped of flesh on buttocks and thighs, and Phillips’ shaken report, repeated verbatim from his lapel recorder, whispered a memory at him, “It was, after all, necessary,” in a cajoling whine.

It was all the prisoner had said; he had lapsed thereafter into terrified, hands-over-mouth silence, and now refused to speak to the SM who agreed, not unreasonably, that the man was demented. It was a matter for the psychs.

The Area Psych placed the man, now weeping but still mute, into Total Cerebral Scan and in two minutes had the computer report. “Pretty normal,” he told the SM. “His present trouble is an excessive hysterical reaction, probably resulting from his confessed barbaric behaviour, so reported. He is in a state of abject terror, totally disorganised. He won’t talk about it — or anything else. In any case I can’t Deep Question him without prior authority.”

Correct; he could not. The damnable Common Rights Act slowed investigations unconscionably. No use arguing about it. “But you must have sedated him.”

“Of course, but there are limits to that. Sedation isn’t a truth serum, you know. This man is too scared to open his mouth at all; scared out of his wits, I’d say, of the power of authority to scour his mind.”

The SM sighed at the prospect of complex interdepartmental vocorder argument preparatory to a simple printed-and-signed application. “It sounds like a Deep Question job.”

“It surely does.” The Area Psych signed off.

And the SM asked helplessly, “But what the hell were they doing starving in the crashpad?”

He asked the question of the empty air, but received an answer from a still shaken Allenby, who had just placed his completed formal report on his superior’s desk: “It could be, Sir. You see, the story is the corridor people had thrown them both out, told them not to come back or they’d, er — set on them, do them harm. So they had nowhere to go. They couldn’t even go back to their room for fear of attack.”

This was new to the SM. “And what caused the ostracism?”

“The people thought they were witches. Corridor folk believe in things like that, Sir. They aren’t what you’d call educated down there.”

A simple atrocity was beginning to sprout cancerous secondaries.

“Witches!” And why not? He could believe anything of the corridor scum. “And who told you about that?”

“Well, Sir, there was this boy —”

When he had heard the story the SM said, “Of course you brought the boy in?”

Allenby stared at his boots.

“Well?”

The constable said, “He ran off, Sir,” and continued to stare down while the storm broke about him.

While the hysteric crouched in a corner of his cell, alternately weeping and muttering disjointed phrases that made no sense, a batch of junior detectives went door-knocking in the corridors, concentrating on the area where the kid had confronted the constables.

As they might have expected, the area of hard information turned out to be two miles away in another corridor district, but there, on the home ground of dissension, it came in a torrent.

“You mean them Colsons? Got rid of ‘em? I’ll say we got them bastards out —”

“— told the pair o’ shits if we ever seen ‘em ‘ere again we’d trample ‘em.”

“Witches? ‘Course they was witches. My Jessie only poked ‘er tongue at the woman an’ nex’ day she was all out in acne pimples. Quick as that. Overnight!”

“— an’ ‘er walkin’ around wif ‘er nose in the air ‘an ‘er posh voice! Lady bloody muck an’ us all dirt!”

“You can’t tell me what ‘appened to old Jerry wasn’t set up an’ witch-planned! All ‘e done was spit when the bitch walked past ‘im an’ she give ‘im a glare :er sizzle ‘is balls. Nex’ thing ‘e trips on the gutter an’ busts ‘is knee an’ that same morning ‘e falls downstairs an’ cracks ‘is ‘ead an’ that night ‘is ration coupon goes loose from ‘is pocket so it takes ‘im three days to get a new one. An’ ‘er lookin’ at ‘im every time she passed like she’s workin’ out what next! An’ ‘im a steady man that never fell about or lost fingers! It scared the shit outa ‘im.”

“— so they ‘ad ter go. We couldn’t put up with —”

“— an’ Mrs Ogg knew ‘em at once. She knew ‘em in Sydney before she got redunded an’ ‘ad to come to the corridors. That was thirty years before an’ them lookin’ only in their twenties same as now. Then she seen ‘em in the street ten years on an’ they pretended they didn’t know ‘er, but it was them all right. Then they come ‘ere an’ they was still the same, lookin’ like twenty-five or sumfing. She wasn’t game to claim ‘em again but she told everybody. Thirty years an’ not a day older! So what could a right person think? They ‘ad ter go!”

And so the Colsons had been driven from their miserable one room in the corridors, with threats and menaces and the jeers of children — and more than a few blows on their departing backs from good and proper people who would not risk facing their eyes — to the sterile safety of a crashpad.

The detectives reported back to an SM preoccupied by another report from Med Section. His preoccupation became alert only at the account of the woman who claimed to have seen them in past years.

“Bring her in! I want to hear her for myself.”

Two puzzled detectives departed to seek the rambling, batty old woman — while the SM meditated on his conversation with the Med Section Manager’s confidential addendum to his official report, putting a hazy two and two rather shakily together.

The Med Manager had said, “That looney of yours was shit scared of something. Wouldn’t take — not a word out of him — but as soon as he saw the Gen Ex setup he froze stiff as a board.”

“He’d just been through the Total Scan; the General Examination Unit looks much the same. The corridors think it can read thoughts; it rocks them silly.”

“It’s a bloody shame about the corridors. Public Aid should do something about eliminating the scatty beliefs in the jobless sector.”

The SM had heard all that before. He said, “Public Aid wouldn’t know if half the corridors were up ‘em. Besides, the man did say something, just once, to my constables, and according to them he had an upper class accent. Question: Why was he living in the corridors?”

The Med Manager matched him. “Further question — and this one will go into the full Superintendent’s report because I haven’t any answer to it: Who were the parents who bequeathed him deathless body cells? It came up more or less accidentally in the general scan and we took a closer look to verify it. His cells are perfect, without a sign of senility or budding. All the telomeres are full length, nary a one shortened.”

That was why the SM sent detectives to round up the old woman who said she had known the twenty-five-year-olds for thirty years of unchanging age. And, after he had spoken to her and checked Her veracity under a General Scan, he made a full vocorder report for the ears of the Superintendent — and relaxed, satisfied that this intriguing can of worms would shortly be removed for inspection at a higher level.

Still, it would be interesting to know …

(IV)

The Superintendent said to his unsurprisable Adjutant of Police, “The Wandering Jew is with us again. This yarn has been doing the rounds of the superstitious since the Middle Ages, but I haven’t heard of him chopping his wife before.”

“But Deep Question,” said the Adjutant, “will reveal a simple explanation without putting so much as a dent in the legend.”

“Party-pooper!” said the Super. “Still, get it rolling and we’ll be first with the latest.”

And so, on the next day the crying, screaming, fighting, terrified man was injected with a sophisticated cocktail which floated his conscious mind on euphoric clouds while his unchained tongue charted the paths to hell.

“Date of birth,” said the Super, “eighth of October, nineteen ninety. A hundred and forty years later he cut his wife’s throat as a matter of necessity! I’ve seen him — who wouldn’t want to take a look at a man with that beginning and ending — and I’d swear he’s not a day over thirty, after allowing for wear and tear. And Med Section says his physical markers confirm it.”

“The greatest recorded age of a human being,” said the Adjutant, “belonged to some old geezer in Tibet — a hundred and thirty-two. But he was a blind, stuttering bag of wrinkles when he died. There must be some other explanation for this.”

“It will also have to explain how he could impossibly lie under Deep Question. It took them half an hour to get to the birth date because they kept on quizzing him about his upper class accent and getting nonsensical answers. Then at last somebody woke that there might be a clue in Mrs Ogg’s story, and asked him when he was born. And I’ll bet that reply rocked their psychological boat right over the waterfall.”

“It won’t be hard to check.”

“It’s out of our hands now, thank all the little laughing gods. History Department will check back on birth records and then start squirrelling for traces down the years. The best of ageless luck to them!”

The History Department of State Records observed the request, wondered briefly if the Police Psychology Section was out of its collective mind, then set its data files in action.

The search of Births, Deaths and Marriages verified the birth of John Vincent Colson on eighth October, 1990, and his marriage to Paula Bette Constantinou on fourth May, 2012. There was no record of children of the union.

Hist Dept scratched its collective head in disbelief, checked and rechecked, made its report and waited for the uproar. There was no uproar, only a further request for detail on Colson’s life.

Then the search was really on.

First, and obviously, the newspapers. With the introduction of the molecular nanochip early in the twenty-first century the data capacity of computers became figuratively astronomical; every piece of printed material after that time was preserved in those illimitable maws. History Department asked for Colson references in 2012 and got several hundred of them, scattered all over the country; it became a matter of elimination. Someone recalled that the request data identified Colson’s accent as “upper class”. He didn’t know that the present “upper class” accent was the common Australian speech of Colson’s day and that language had deteriorated as wealth and degrees of education had become almost strata caste marks in speech, scaling down, stratum by stratum, to the gutter argot of the corridors; he thought that the society wedding might have attracted news cameras. In ignorance he struck gold; the internet had featured the Colson match in a Weddings of Distinction slot in the “rich bitch” weekly update.

The likeness to the man, recorded in Deep Question placidity, and the woman, calm in death in the morgue, were unmistakeable. Startling as they were, they were not yet proof, but Hist Dept now had a line to follow.

John Colson was a millionaire — several times over, and over again; one contemporary tattler estimated his worth at a hundred million (which was quite a packet in those days) while wife Paula was no genuine rich bitch at all but had been a small part player in stage musicals.

Oh, lucky Paula, with the catch of the week!

The news followed their society trail, for they were “bright young things” of their generation and their trail of celebration and spending was conspicuous — for fifteen years of monotonously unageing camera reportage. Then they vanished.

“Now, where the hell did they get to?” asked the Tracer.

His more imaginative Supervisor asked, “Where would you get to once people began to notice and ask questions? They were touching forty by then and still looking twenty-five.”

“Anywhere you weren’t known.”

“Not good enough. In the big money stratum you’re always known among the globetrotters. Try somewhere that no questions would be asked so long as you had money. Try Korea or Egypt or the Russian States. Anywhere away from the jet setters.”

“You mean just the whole rest of the world.”

“Not really. I mean, wait till we get the report of the Deep Question. We have the initial proof of something screwy; the rest will be just a checkup.”

“For a moment,” said the Tracer, “you had me frightened.”

2

(I)

Even now that Psych Section knew what to look for, the Deep Question session had its frustrations. From the beginning Colson demonstrated a congenital inability to tell a connected story. He veered off at tangents, mixed real events with remembered speculation and leapt from one subject to another with a lack of continuity that drove his questioners to confusion. And the drug-induced ability to remember entire century-old conversations verbatim, in search of some fact of presumed but doubtful relevance, bored them to tears.

In desperation they called for an IQ summary and the trembling man was returned briefly to Psych Section. The scanner buzzed and mumbled for its few minutes of readings and comparisons. “IQ 108” flashed in the holospace, followed by a list of capacities and incapacities. Not very many useful mental capacities.

108! And this very ordinary intelligence had been in control of a vast fortune! Little wonder he had finished broke.

Not only was the intelligence ordinary, but queries about school reports suggested that even what existed had come in for little use. The questioners gave a collective sigh and settled in for a long, long haul.

Their final report — consisting, as required, of the subject’s actual words — was in fact a masterpiece of joint editing and compression. They ran it first past Hist Dept’s Supervisor and Tracer to check for errors and anomalies that might have arisen during the editing process.

Supervisor and Tracer settled back in their chairs. The Tracer waved his hand over the control arm and the wedding photo of John and Paula Colson flashed in the holospace in the centre of the room, the bride in a complicated confection of white frills and flounces, the groom in formal grey, both of them smiling and waving.

The Tracer groaned, “What a time! Dressing like that for a hitching! What would they wear for a really serious occasion? Deep mourning?”

They would have been, in any clothes, an unimpressive pair. John Colson was of average height, with an average slender build and a face unmemorable in any crowd; only the smile enlivened him but not very much. Paula was more lively, but without real personality — “cute” was possibly the word of that time for her.

“And that pair of nitwits,” said the Supervisor, “had a hundred million and the gift of life! God works in a mysterious way!”

From midair John Vincent Colson spoke the story of his life in a light voice and easy, everyday speech, not much distinguished by personal quirks or oddities, and its expressiveness slightly flattened by the effects of the Deep Question drug cocktail.

(II)

It wasn’t my doing that I was rich. My parents died suddenly when I was twenty-one, and as the only child I inherited the lot. The Area Guidance Grid had just come into use in Melbourne, bringing all vehicle traffic under radio control. You have different systems now but for us, suffering almost permanent gridlock in the central business district, it was a godsend. But nothing pleases everyone and it took only one dissenting ratbag of a demonstrator to close a master switch that let all the traffic suddenly loose at fifty kilometres an hour with the drivers sitting back, not holding their wheels because the Grid was guiding them. There were over a thousand accidents in the ten seconds it took someone to tear the fool away from the switchboard and return power, and both my parents died.

And there I was, suddenly sole heir to the income from a hundred million dollars in shares. I had just come back from a holiday in France after finishing my university course (I didn’t do too well, missed out on my degree) and so had no business experience. And with a hundred million behind me, I didn’t intend ever to have any. Why should I? I had the world at my feet, didn’t I? I had drawn the big ticket in the money pool, and all I had to do was spend it.

You can call me stupid and I suppose I was. But just remember that I was twenty-one and on top of the world. It all came unstuck eventually, but that was long afterwards. For the moment I was free as the air; and after I had got over the deaths of the old folks, I married Paula. She probably had her eye on the money as much as on me, but I was love crazy and could have what I wanted, and together we lived the high life — travel and parties and nobody to please but ourselves.

I suppose, now, that our lifestyle was what attracted Doctor Templeton’s attention. With millions to spend and no work to do, we must have made an obvious target.

Paula heard of him before I did, and she heard from her personal maid. We had plenty of house staff then; what with automation and robotic assembly lines and what they called “company downsizing”, there was plenty of cheap labour then, and things got much worse for the unemployed later on. Anyway, Paula told me about her maid passing on a bit of gossip about some scientist with a treatment that could add years to your life. She was just laughing it off. But a couple of days later I heard it from my chauffeur, and thereafter it seemed to crop up every so often. But it always came from the staff, never from the gossipmongers of our social set. Maybe we should have noticed that, but we didn’t.

Paula got quite worked up about it, thinking that it was so persistent there must be something in it. But at that time there had been a big increase world wide in rejuvenation treatments of a new kind that required not only superficial surgery, but some jacking up of enzyme activity to make it last longer. Several people died of it, and quite a few countries, including Australia, banned it. Paula thought this was why this Doctor Whoever didn’t come out openly. He probably had something new, but was stopped by the ban.

She dropped a few questions among the staff, in an idle not-very-interested sort of way, and eventually they came up with a name — Doctor Templeton.

Well, just for curiosity, we asked around our set if anybody had ever heard of him, and it turned out he was quite a bigwig in one of the city universities; but nobody had heard about any juve work. I forget which uni — does it matter?

(The Supervisor muttered, “Of course it matters, you twit!” To the Tracer he said, “Check out Templeton.”

That was simple. Professor Ernest Templeton, 1965-2023, had been the head of Biology in the then new University of Eastern Suburbs (est. 2009).

“So he wasn’t just a phoney looking for suckers. Or was he the real thing, but still looking for suckers?”)

This was in 2015. I was just twenty-five and Paula was twenty-four. We were enjoying life — and I mean really enjoying it, partying and whooping it up — and when the rumours seemed to die out, we just forgot about this Templeton feller. Then, out of the blue, I got a vidcall from him saying he wanted to see me.

Naturally I wanted to know what for, and he said he’d heard I had been enquiring about him. You could have knocked me down with a feather; nobody in my crowd was likely to know him well enough to pass on gossip, and especially not the servants. I didn’t know what to say because the whole idea suddenly seemed like a load of hogwash and I think I began to stutter a bit. I said something about hearing his name in connection with some research.

He broke in on me there, saying the nature of his research was top secret and he didn’t want it discussed on the public vid. So I shut up and didn’t know what to say. He went on about these rumours being embarrassing and asked could he talk to me privately, in my office, for instance. I told him I had private means and didn’t need an office and suggested I could come to the university and see him. But he said, “No, no, not there,” and it would be better if he came to my place.

Well, that was all right with me. I think I was a bit flattered at having one of the big brains wanting to talk to me, especially as there was a bit of secrecy about it. Our crowd of professional highfliers didn’t get on the inside of intellectual things much, and this sounded novel. Anyway, I fixed it for him to come out that night.

I told Paula, and she was happy with the idea. She said, “Perhaps we’ll find out if there’s anything in the story.”

(The Supervisor said, “Smell the makings of a scam!” but the Tracer objected, “If so, it was one that paid off.”

“Sure — but to whom?”)

We had somewhere to go that night, but we cancelled because this was a new sort of thing to happen to us, and we were both curious about it.

The professor arrived on time, and he seemed quite young. Actually he was about fifty. Paula was surprised because she had thought professors were old and looked like the pictures of Albert Einstein, whereas Templeton might have been a shopkeeper or a bus conductor. We took him into the smaller lounge and offered him a drink, but he brushed that aside and started right into business.

He said, “You have been asking questions about me. Why?”

That flustered me a bit; I wasn’t used to the middle classes and their direct ways. My crowd always liked to set a cosy atmosphere, go into things gently; but Paula had had a tougher upbringing, and she said right away, “Because we heard about your work and it sounded interesting.”

“And what did you imagine my work to be?”

He didn’t quite sound aggressive, but it was a give-me-no-nonsense question. It didn’t bother Paula any. She said straight out, “We heard you had a new kind of rejuvenation treatment, one that added actual years to your real lifetime as well as making you look young.”

“And you believed that?”

“Why not?”

It was time for me to take part; a man shouldn’t leave this sort of thing to his wife. Besides, I had had professors at the uni and their status didn’t impress me at all. I said, “It was only rumour, wasn’t it? We didn’t exactly believe it, but it didn’t sound impossible, and you would have to keep it quiet because of the fuss about juvenation treatments and the laws prohibiting the injections after people started dying.”

He still had a question. “Can you tell me, please, how you came to hear of this, er, rumour? It could be very disturbing.”

It was for Paula to tell him, “I heard it first from my personal maid. She was doing my hair one day and talking about things in general, and she said it as one of the silly things you hear.”

I said, “My wife told me, and a few days later my chauffeur mentioned it to me as a bit of the silly talk doing the rounds.”

Templeton said musingly, “Maid and chauffeur.” I thought he sounded almost satisfied. “Only those two?”

“And some of the other servants, but they might have heard it from the first two. It was just working class gossip; they’ll latch on to anything just for something to say. I asked some of our social crowd if they had heard about it, but they hadn’t; so it was just the servants’ tattle. And like all these stories, it died out after a week or two.”

That seemed to make him happy. “That is just as well. It would be interesting to know where the maid and chauffeur heard it in the first place. But to enquire would only give rumour fresh currency.” He was quiet for a moment; then he said, “There is some truth in their tale.”

I can tell you my ears pricked up at that, and I heard Paula breathe a mite faster beside me. I didn’t look at her and tried to seem unexcited myself, just interested in what he was saying.

But Paula went straight at it: “You mean about extending the life span?”

He stared a moment at both of us, as if he was making up his mind what to say. And then: “That is what I mean. I think I should trust you in this; you have had the chance and temptation to spread gossip and have not done so.”

I felt guilty. I had to say, “I did make a couple of enquiries but shut up when nobody knew what I was talking about.” I wasn’t going to say I shut up because the buggers laughed at me.

“That was natural, Mister Colson, and on drawing a blank you let the matter rest. I am conscious of dealing with intelligent, cautious people.”

I don’t flatter myself all that much, but it’s a good feeling to hear yourself praised for doing the right thing by someone with real brains. But Paula was properly stirred up and curious; you heard it in her voice when she felt hot on the trail of something.

She asked straight out, “You mean you can prolong people’s lives. I mean, really?”

Templeton thought about it before he said, “Shall we say I am working to that end? The basic knowledge requirement has been available since the end of the last century, but harnessing the knowledge, making a usable technique from disparate facts is a complex matter, not one to be rushed.”

I couldn’t think of a remark that wouldn’t be obvious or plain silly, but Paula had more imagination than I did; she said, “A really long life would be wonderful, but you can’t just get older and older and more useless and maybe contract Alzheimer’s or something like that.”

“Of course not, Mrs Colson. The thing is, to add the extra years to the prime of life, to make time stand still in youth. And even Alzheimer’s disease can be dealt with today.”

It could? I wasn’t up with things like that; you could always find out the technical stuff when you needed it, and my way of life didn’t need it. Not then, anyway.

Paula complained that that was only like rejuvenation, and Templeton corrected her. “Rejuvenants start to age normally as soon as their treatment is completed. My procedure looks to maintain youth. You see, it is not rejuvenation, which in any case is illegal, but preservation of the status quo. If I treated you today, you would remain at your present age.”

“But for how long?”

Templeton shrugged. “I can’t guess. One might have to wait a century to find out.”

“A century!” I couldn’t help it; surprise jerked it out of me. But on thinking about it, it made sense. And this man sounded as though he was really on to something.

We talked for a while after that, guessing how terrific life would be if people could stay young, working out how you could do all those things you keep putting off until you’re too old to bother, how you’d see the good times going on and on … I suppose you’d say we came up with silly things; I know we laughed a lot.

When the time came that Templeton said he must leave, we were seeing him out when he asked casually if we would like to see his laboratory and get a better idea of how the work went. Paula said, “Yes,” right away. She was really taken with the whole idea.

So we made an appointment for a few days’ time …

As he was going, he said he hoped we would treat our conversation as confidential. We told him that went without saying. Scientists had to keep their work confidential, didn’t they?

(The Supervisor slapped his thigh. “See the hook being dangled to a brace of babes in arms?”

The Tracer was dubious. “Can’t say I do.”

“Like this: Templeton actually had a long-life gismo, but he can’t waste years doing tests on lab animals — he needs human subjects. But that will tangle him in all sorts of legal restriction, and with the juvenation laws already in place, he’s got Buckley’s chance of a grant or any sort of backing. He needs money; who doesn’t? One way or another he needs a sucker, so he casts around for a wealthy fall guy. He comes up with Colson, living on the investment of a hundred million dollars and living it up in the social whirligig, having no job, not even sitting on a management board, a pretty obvious featherhead. So he gets somebody to do a little bribery of Colson’s house staff. Remember that then the out-of-work percentage was rising everywhere, private staff was cheap — no unions, you see — and a couple of hundred was manna from heaven to the little people, same as now. Just pay them to drop a bit of stray gossip into the ears of madam and the boss, wait for it to settle in, and then make your contact, complaining about rumours. If they look interested, start paying out the line. A visit to the laboratory, maybe — all in strict confidence, of course — making them privy to a big secret. And then the big spiel. Bingo!”)

(II)

Templeton’s laboratory wasn’t at the uni. He had a small private setup, at his home, with just a single assistant, where he did his own unfunded research. Well, who would back that sort of work with the juvenation laws in place and soundly policed? Paula asked why he did it if the work couldn’t be used, and he said that science wasn’t based on law, but on the search for truth; laws could and would be rescinded as rime passed and circumstances altered, but truth was itself, unchanging, waiting until its time came to be recognised.

He was a selfless man, dedicated to his work. At least that was how I saw him.

(The Supervisor made a noise between a chuckle and a bray.)

The laboratory was more or less what I expected — long benches with taps and sinks, lots of glassware in racks and stands, a couple of microscopes, a few complicated setups that I couldn’t recognise at all as well as small video screens. It was all very neat and orderly, not at all the common version of the scientist up to his armpits in weird-looking bric-a-brac.

As if he thought we had some such hazy idea of the researcher at work, Templeton said, “You can see it isn’t spectacular, but neither is the work — just a monotonous checking of ongoing experiments and pondering the reasons for unwanted results. There is actually very little to see, but I will make my explanations as untechnical as possible.”

Of course Paula, with her unfortunate tendency to try to impress people, had to say, “We’ve been reading up on the biology of ageing in the last couple of days just so we would know what you would be talking about. It’s fascinating stuff, Professor. I hadn’t realised there were so many angles to it.”

Yes, we had been reading it up in articles downloaded from the net and finding them pretty heavy going; even “popular” scientific articles can present you with a whole raft of new words; and while reading we were constantly calling up the dictionary, but on the whole we had gathered a fair grasp of the up-to-date knowledge about ageing.

Just the same, I thought I caught a speculative gleam in Templeton’s eyes, like a man repressing a smile while he seeks the right thing to say, but his only comment was, “Then the essential key words will be familiar to you, which will help.”

Paula said eagerly, “Telomeres and cell division and enzymes and all that.” There was a sort of strangled note in her voice. I hadn’t realised that she was quite so worked up about this visit.

If Templeton detected her excitement he did not show it, saying only, “Telomeres make a useful place to start,” as he shepherded us to a pair of the microscopes standing side by side. He had everything set up ready for us. We didn’t even have to look into the microscopes; he closed a switch and the picture of the slide appeared on the vidscreen behind it.

He said, “You know that every cell nucleus in your body contains chromosomes consisting mainly of DNA and proteins, and every chromosome carries a protein tail called a telomere. The enlarged screen picture shows it clearly enough, I think.”

He might have thought so, but to me the picture was mostly a blur. Everything about a cell is transparent, and as a result the thing is hard to make out unless you have the knowledge and the practice. What you see is like a jelly with little solid bits spread through it, with the seeing made harder because of the other jellies crowding it. As for the tail — the telomere — I had the impression of a transparent, wispy thing, quite long and sinuous. It was hard to credit that one’s whole body was made up of millions and millions of these cells, all of them too small to imagine.

I was lost in contemplation of this miracle of human construction but Paula, usually a fairly self-contained woman, was in the grip of a real agitation of words she could not hold back. As if she would urge Templeton on she said, “The cell divides and the telomere shrinks every time until the cell is too old to divide any more. And you use telomerase to control it, stop it shrinking. And that makes it immortal! Is that how you do it?”

Templeton said quietly, as if that might calm her down, “The telomere certainly marks off the life of the cell, but the simple introduction of telomerase might result in a rather brutal form of cell immortality — cancer.”

Most of the cancers were controllable by then, but the word still had its menace; it stopped Paula. She said simply, “Oh,” and shut up. Which I thought was just as well. Her enthusiasm … call it that, but it was more like a dog smelling prey and dragging at the leash … made me uncomfortable.

Templeton carried on: “Telomeres and telomerase have their place in the process, but the whole is vastly more complex. The basic problem is the prevention of cell senescence. This can be achieved, even to the point of cell division, without shrinkage of the telomere; but even the healthiest cells — those wherein ageing and division have been artificially halted — may be subject to invasion by viral infection or genetic mutation and, given sufficient time, will be. So, you see, the problem widens to include the working of the immune system, which is itself a complex of interactions, to protect the potentially immortal cells.”

The problem was, in fact, one on a scale far greater than our naive introductory reading of simplistic texts had allowed us to realise, and now Templeton launched into explanation of all the things we didn’t know and hadn’t dreamed of knowing. He tried to make it easy, to simplify it for our unscientific educations, but we listened in a sort of daze, trying to look as though we were following intently. As he introduced each new term, I forgot the meaning of the one before it and in the end was reduced to simply waiting for him to finish; and later Paula told me it was the same with her. It wasn’t that we weren’t totally interested, just that after a while we stopped understanding.

(The Supervisor gave an exaggerated sigh. “Portrait of a pair of high society halfwits being worked over by a master.”

The Tracer objected, “But in the end he produced the goods.”

“Yes, but why?”)

I remember he started with the way the genes in the cell DNA misbehave as we get older — favourable ones ceasing to operate while unfavourable ones tend to spring into action, leading to brittling of the bones and expression of the collagenase enzyme that causes wrinkles, and making the immune system deaf to the messenger molecules that keep disease at bay. He went on with how helicases enable repair enzymes to deal with random mutations that keep on occurring in the cell … how a minimal diet can prolong the cell’s lifespan but has other undesirable consequences … how telomerase is “switched on” in sperm cells to prevent their telomeres shrinking during the furious division rate of the embryo … how the immortal cancer cells could be merged with normal cells to lengthen their lifespans … and so on and on with all sorts of ideas until he completely lost me in pouring out ideas I could no longer follow.

In the end he said, “I completed this work three years ago and am slowly realising that it was a complete waste of time. All I have to show for it is a batch of puppies.”

He gave a loud whistle which made both of us jump, and through a catflap in a door at the far end of the laboratory burst a spate of fox terriers, four of them, that made straight for Templeton and fawned at his legs while he patted their heads. One was full-grown, one about nine months old, one about half that, and the fourth at not much more than the suckling stage.

“They are all from the same litter,” he said, “but given my anti-ageing treatment at different stages of their development.”

He bent down to the little one which promptly rolled on its back to have its belly tickled, squealing with delight.

He said, “God only knows how long they’ll live, or if they’ll die at all, except by accident. I’ve done good work on the immune system — published a couple of papers in fact — but the main work is unpublishable of course.”

Paula asked, “Why, ‘of course’?” but I saw at once what he meant. Let this secret out and every ratbag in creation would be clamouring for eternal life. It was the sort of thing to be handled with great care and discretion, given only to those who would make good use of it.

Templeton expressed it differently. “No responsible government would permit such information to be published. The real reason behind the banning of juvenation treatments, aside from the occasionally lethal side effects, is its potential to increase the lifespan of individuals in a world already overloaded with mostly useless nonagenarians. Do you realise that world population is increasing by more than a hundred million every year, each new child having a life expectation of ninety years, that a day is coming when actual birth will be necessarily rendered illegal simply because the planet will not be able to feed its hordes of aged? Consider such a situation rendered intolerable by people who never die!”

Put like that, his work seemed a real dead end. But Paula argued, “Just the same, there are useful people — useful to everybody, I mean — like geniuses and great artists. They should be exceptions.”

Templeton smiled. “With the rest of the world crying out, ‘Why them and not me?’. With the rich and powerful finding backstairs methods of achieving immortality while the bulk of people become the second grade citizens of the short term?”

I wanted to say, “We aren’t like that,” but the fact was that, given the chance, we would be exactly like that. I felt a little shiver up my spine at the idea of being offered such a chance.

Paula said, like a little girl denied a treat, “Then all your work’s useless, all for nothing. Why bother doing it?”

Templeton shrugged. “I am a research scientist. There was a problem for solution. The basic facts were known, but the mode of application was not. I applied myself to the mode and made it possible.”

She said, “So now you just sit on it because it’s not publishable?”

He smiled. “There is great satisfaction in a goal achieved. And there are many side issues yet to be investigated. There will come a time when humanity’s population problems have been solved, and then my work will come into its own.”

Paula was amazed. “You mean you’ll just slog away at these side issues just for a fame you’ll never live to see? With just a few dogs to show for all your work!”

The dogs had quietened down and now lay on their bellies, gazing up at Templeton as if they offered support. He said, “The dogs are evidence enough for the tests a scientist can apply. But they are not evidence that the procedure would give similar results on a human being. Add that the anti-juvenation laws could be invoked to forbid the procedure and human experiment becomes impossible.” It seemed a crass sort of end to all his work, until he added like a quiet throwaway, “I have processed myself, of course, but that is a personal matter the law cannot control.”

I remember thinking that of course he’d try out his treatment on himself (what man wouldn’t?), but it was Paula who asked, breathlessly, “And how long will you live?”

He laughed at her earnestness. “Certainly not forever. I am sixty years old, my body has already some of the earmarks of senescence, and mine is not a juvenation process; it preserves only what is already there. I expect to remain in my present condition until some failure of already degenerated cells triggers an ending. Long life is for the young whose body cells have not been subjected to degeneration and replacement.”

There didn’t seem much to be said after that, but Paula had some nag that had to be satisfied, and she asked, “So what will you do? Just go on exploring your ‘side issues’ and writing papers that disguise the real truth?”

“Perhaps not even that. My field of biology does not attract university grants which increasingly demand research which will bring a financial return, which in turn means providing cures for the new diseases forever emerging from the rainforests and mutating faster than medicine can pursue. That is not my field, nor is it one that attracts me. And without money I am finding it difficult to continue. A laboratory does not run itself on a professor’s stipend, and the large financial concerns cannot be expected to take much interest in a branch of biological research which in the end promises little in the way of patients and big returns.”

I was thinking of what must be a lifetime’s dedication gone for nothing because of the restrictive population laws, which were likely to become even more stringent as the cities spread and the forests shrank to provide farm land. I thought Paula might say something, but she kept quiet, even seemed a mite pensive in sympathy with Templeton. We talked for a while about nothing that mattered, but the visit was already over.

(The Supervisor cheered, “Trap set!”

The Tracer nodded. “It seems obvious when you know the end result. He needed money, and he needed youthful subjects who couldn’t talk afterwards without risking gaol.”

“Most of all,” said the Supervisor, “he needed a couple of social nits with money and the IQs of ants, who would see nothing but the glittering prize.”)

That day we were using the small city runabout rather than the big limousine (it was, after all, only a minor social visit we made, not an occasion for display among equals), and all the way home Paula was in a state of suppressed excitement. When I asked her what was up, she indicated that the chauffeur could hear us, and wouldn’t answer me; but as soon as we got home she practically exploded.

You have to understand that I literally never thought about money. All my life I had had money without asking or thinking where it came from. I had never worked for it — why should I? My dad had talked about my getting some “business experience”, but he had died before doing anything about it, leaving me with the income from something like a hundred million dollars being paid into the bank regularly. Why should I work? In sanity, who would want to? So I never thought about money.

And so when Paula bubbled over with her idea, I was taken by surprise. She had actually worked for her living on the stage, and she amused me at times by feeling guilty about our expenditure, as though one day the money might in some fashion vanish; but I was really taken aback now by the way her mind really worked.

On the way home I had played with the idea of giving Templeton a few thousand to go on with while he looked for a backer, but now Paula wanted to build him a private laboratory, with us financing the whole thing. “He can do his research and hire some people to work on the tropical diseases and stuff. That way the laboratory can pay its way with patents and medicines.”

(“God preserve us,” said the Supervisor, “from entrepreneurs who learned their trade in drama school.”)

I said there was no guarantee that the lab could pay its way, even if Templeton was a genius, and she stamped her foot at my stupidity. She practically shrieked, “The treatment! The ageing treatment! If we own the place, he’ll have to let us have it!”

Naturally, I had played with the idea of undergoing Templeton’s treatment as a fantasy of watching history go by before my unchanging gaze, while I enjoyed the whole world’s emerging pleasures with what was for all practical purposes an inexhaustible supply of cash. Faced with a very real plan for making this true, I became cautious. To tell the truth, I didn’t at first take her seriously; the whole thing suddenly seemed the stuff of abracadabra and ali-kazam, with Templeton the wizard who would vanish on our waking.

I protested, “We don’t even know that it works.”

“The dogs!” she screamed, shaking my arm. “The dogs!”

“They prove nothing really. We have only his word that they belong to the same litter.”

She said only, “I believe him.”

In fact so did I. It wasn’t only that he was persuasive in his directness, but that he had no obvious reason to build up an edifice of lies.

“We could build him a bigger laboratory to research the disease work,” she insisted.

And why not? I had thought about giving him a handout, hadn’t I?

And I thought some more about those four dogs stabilised at different stages of development…

Actually, ownership of the laboratory wouldn’t give us any title to his previous work. But we could dangle it as a bait, couldn’t we?

But what would we get if he agreed to give us his anti-ageing treatment? The dogs looked healthy enough, but what long-term side effects might there be? The business about marrying cancer cells with normal cells sounded a bit dicey; he said it was fully controlled, but I didn’t fool myself I understood his explanation of how it was done.

The truth was that I was attracted and distrustful — call it “frightened” — in equal measures. On one hand was the prospect of eternal youth stretching into an immeasurable future; on the other was the possibility that the human guinea pigs might come to some uncalculated, unforeseen, ghastly end.

It was Paula’s insistence that eventually won me round. I was still very much in love with her vivacity and gaiety and charm, still in the state wherein I found it almost impossible to deny her anything.

Looking back and looking deeper into ourselves, I see that Paula was hysterical with greed for a life of endless youth and pleasure while I, hesitant and even cowardly in the face of one of a yearning mankind’s greatest fantasies was, at bottom, utterly seduced by it.

Neither of us gave a thought to the meaning of an unending time.

(III)

We invited Templeton to our home and he came. Neither of us remarked that he didn’t even ask what we wanted with him, simply agreed to the appointment and came.

We gave him dinner and then, with the servants out of the way, I asked him straight out what would be the cost of establishing a laboratory where he could carry on his own private work while assistants carried on a more financially productive research.

He must have known what basically we were after, but the laboratory offer may have surprised him. He pondered a while, pushing a wine glass to and fro on the tablecloth while he frowned in concentration. It took him quite a while to say, in a cautious, half-querying tone, “About four million dollars. A considerable amount of that would be an investment to cover staff wages during the setting-up and pre-productive period.”

It was a bigger sum than I had expected. Much bigger. I glanced at Paula and saw that she cared not a damn what the cost might be — she was hooked on the dream. It would mean selling off about four percent of my total holdings, but that would not make enough of a dent in my income to cause any reduction in our lifestyle. I was in a position where money simply piled up, year after year; we lived the good life to be sure, but we never went in for expensive collectables or more establishment than reasonable people could use, and so we lived easily within my income. Call us drones if you like, but not fabulously expensive drones.

(“He was probably hooking in seven or eight million a year,” said the Supervisor. “Even with about fifty percent tax, the unimaginative shits couldn’t think how to spend it! The social partying set dangling at the end of its tether!”

“A nice life, though,” murmured the Tracer.)

I said, “Supposing that I should make that money available for such a project…” I let it trail off, leaving it to him to make the running. I didn’t mean to go into such a commitment blindfold.

Templeton said, slowly, like a man bemused, as if he was working out the best way to go, “In, say, three days, I could provide a breakdown of costs. That is, if you are serious about this.”

And of course I said I’d be interested to see it, as if it was all in the air, just in the idea stage.

(“Not blindfold, only led by the nose,” said the Supervisor.)

In three days I had the breakdown. “You can check the costings,” Templeton told me, “against market prices.”

Perhaps I could, but I didn’t know where to start. I told him I’d take a few days to think about it, and he seemed satisfied; then I sat down to read the lists and explanatory documents and couldn’t make head or tail of the greater part of them. In the end I took them to an accountant friend who kept them for a week and then said he couldn’t fault the documents although some of the setting-up expenses, like initial building costs and such, were hazy but reasonable.

So I had Templeton out home again and told him I was prepared to go ahead with setting him up in his own establishment. He wasn’t effusively grateful, but totally business-like, which suited me well; after all he was a brilliant man, at the top of his tree, who had no call to behave like a servant.

I held the crucial condition for the last minutes of the meeting, when his mind was fully engaged with the prospect of a free hand to pursue his dreams. Paula was with us, of course, and I held her hand as I told him we wanted to be the human guinea pigs for the trial of his extended life treatment.

He was silent for a long time, and at the end said only, “Have you thought? Are you sure you wish this?”

I asked, “Why not? You have treated yourself, and no harm has come to you.”

Beside me, Paula burst out, “It is a condition! Our condition! Your laboratory in exchange for the treatment!” She was beside herself with excitement at seeing the prize in her grasp.

Templeton tried to slow us down, to provide time for thought, but I caught some of Paula’s urgency and insisted that he make up his mind.

And in the end he agreed. What else could he do?

(“Trap closed!” said the Supervisor. “And the hunter warning off his victims to the last. His life’s work and a handsome personal salary, no doubt, in exchange for a leap in the dark.”

“But a pretty attractive leap,” said the Tracer. “You have to pay that.”

“One that has come to very bloody grief. There must have been tripwires along the way. Or did a pair of idiots get their desserts?”

The Tracer thought of Paula’s mutilated body. Dessert?)

My money was tied up in two big companies — 21st Century Finance and, an older one, Pegasus Equity. Both had bit holdings in the stocks of other institutions and were too rock solid for me to ever think of dabbling elsewhere; the cash rolled in, I attended directors’ meetings, and life rolled on regardless — until I wanted to withdraw money and was in well over my head. The lawyers had to be called in, and the amount of ensuing entanglement was hard to believe in. You might think that what was on the face of it a simple act of philanthropy would be pretty well straightforward, but just arranging the sale of shares was a major eruption and finally defining the terms of contract between Templeton and myself was a headache two months long. They argued that the idea was not financially viable, that biology was becoming a limited field closed in by the huge, hungry internationals, and that my money would go down the drain.

Half the time I couldn’t follow the duck-and-weave of their arguments, and there was nothing for it but to close my ears and stand firm. I got what I wanted, but it was like surfacing after swimming in treacle; it was my initiation into finance, and a bloody exhausting time it was, but in the end I owned a newly constructed laboratory, and it was time for me to call in Templeton’s big IOU.

I can’t say he was unwilling, but he spent a lot of time pointing out to us that we were embarking on a venture which, by its nature, we could not see the end of. Mostly he seemed concerned with the possibility of uncalculated side effects of the treatment.

Paula pointed out, more than once and with an uncomfortably shrill persistence, that he had treated himself and had come to no harm. Her entire mind was bound up in the prospect of a never-ending youth, and the slightest contra argument brought out a touch of the harridan in her. I suppose that deep down I was as much gripped by the desire as she, but I tried to keep a steady mind until the thing was done. Then would be time to consider the endless future.

Well, not endless perhaps. Only with no end in sight.

Curiously, he never mentioned what turned out to be the first big, discomforting hurdle to be overcome. Perhaps, being an older man, it had not occurred to him. But that was still in the future.

When he accepted that we were fully determined that he keep his side of the bargain, he sent us to our doctor for a full examination — x-rays, brain scans, tests for all manner of metabolic levels. Name it, we had it and came out of it all a very healthy pair. As Templeton said himself, with me twenty-five and Paula twenty-three, we were at the peak of our physical development, right at the brink where cellular old age would begin to complicate our expectancy.

The treatment itself was unspectacular, mostly a matter of progressive injections which, he said, were in the main preparatory, readying various organs for some sort of temporary upset after the final “invasion”, as he termed it.

I must confess to a queasy stomach when this Turned out to be injection of a virus, though Paula heard it without a qualm, still fixed on the goal, the prize, the bliss.

This virus was not one found in nature, but a construct, an artificial form conceived, designed and finally created by Doctor Templeton. Don’t ask me how that was done because I haven’t a clue about it. All I know is that it invaded the body cells and inserted its DNA into the cell reproductive system, like any other virus, but this one carried a gene that negated the effect of cell division. That is, the cell didn’t age and the telomere didn’t shrink. That was the real heart of his treatment.

(The Tracer asked, “Did Templeton leave any lab documents behind?”

“You bet he did, and they all went to his son when the Doctor died, but the old man had more sense than to record the essentials of this little lot. His lab notes were eventually transferred to computer records, so they are still available; but the only remote connection with this affair is two names, scribbled in a margin probably as an aide memoire, which turn out to be the names of Colson’s chauffeur and Paula Colson’s personal maid. And that’s how we know he targeted the Colsons deliberately. He needed big money and he offered a big bait.”

“Send me one like him,” prayed the Tracer.

“The real point,” said the Supervisor, “is that he needed the money for research, not for personal squandering. He probably thought himself justified in suckering a pair of flossbrains. The single-minded are like that.”)

We had to go into “hospital” in a special sterile room of the laboratory (this was before his new staff were hired, so nobody knew we were there), with only a nurse to attend to us — a male nurse who turned out to be Templeton’s son, but pretended he knew nothing about why we were there. The idea was that our immune systems had to be damped down so that antibodies and interferon and ‘phages and such wouldn’t chew up the virus before it did its work. So, naturally, we had to be carefully looked after while all the defences were down.

I can tell you that was a bad two weeks, even in a sterile environment. Anything could have happened.

But nothing did. At the end of it, we simply got dressed and went home, feeling no different from any other day. I suppose there was no reason we should feel different though I think both of us felt as if there should be a big celebration, a public holiday and fireworks and an endless party.

What actually happened was a farewell lecture from Templeton. “I’ll want you under observation for at least ten years. You are both young and it may take at least that long to be certain there are no signs of ageing or lack of signs. And be especially careful not to give way to temptation to tell anyone of your treatment, even a best friend in dead secret. First, because they wouldn’t believe you and would spread the story to everyone they knew as a good joke on the foolish Colsons. Second, because they would eventually bring the anti-juvenation law down on you.”

He had hammered us with that a dozen times and even Paula’s excitement and jubilation recognised the necessity, though her high spirits chafed at the bit.

He said something else, too. “Don’t fool yourselves with ideas of freedom from commonsense precautions. You can still be killed in an accident; nothing can cure a crushed brain. Be careful with diet; you are not immune to heart trauma or cholesterol build-up. Under adverse circumstances, you could even succumb to starvation. Your immune systems are at their zeniths and will remain so, but they can be penetrated if you abuse your bodies with drugs or alcohol beyond moderation.”

So we went home with a sermon and took up life very much as it had been before. What else could we do? Some years would have to pass before we could be sure the treatment had taken.

It all felt like a bit of a letdown.

3

(I)

(“A letdown!” said the Tracer. “A man sinks four million dollars into a dream, and all he feels is a letdown!”

The Supervisor understood. “They were children. They lived in a world where you put your money on the counter and the goods were handed over, ready wrapped, no waiting. They were rich children who had no responsibility for their riches. They lived in fairyland. But now they’d bought something that wouldn’t begin to show for years and years. Ten years is a hell of a long way into the future when you’re twenty-five.”)

I was able to be pretty calm about it. I suppose that at the back of my mind I had always had a speck of doubt about the Templeton thing, and my attitude was, at bottom, a repressed curiosity about the outcome buried under a determination not to think about it. But of course, it was always present, particularly as it couldn’t be mentioned except between ourselves. I had some weird dreams.

But, Paula was a real problem. When we were alone she talked obsessively about the future, our future, about us in stasis watching history flow by, never touching us. I would listen, laughing as her ideas flowered into the fantastic, but later I tried to calm her, to get her mind off the future and fix it on today. I didn’t realise the depth of her obsessive involvement until she became hysterical, screaming that I had no imagination, no appreciation of life and living, that my mind couldn’t encompass any vision beyond the present. She was a job for a psychiatrist, but having anyone poking into her mind was out of the question. In a couple of years she quietened down, but I found out that she was having photographs taken, dozens of them, at least every week, and that she pored over them, searching for signs of ageing.

My love for Paula was very deep; I suppose it was obsessive, and for those first few years it needed to be. I was forever afraid that she would lose control and start to gabble in public. That, at least, never happened. You might think her suppressed hysteria would put a strain on our marriage, but I had been infatuated with her from the start and saw her as my Baby Doll (I called her that), my proud possession entitled to her whims and fancies because I could afford them. Looking back, it sounds shallow but I wanted her, just as she was, for ever and ever. And that was what we had been promised, wasn’t it? That was what calmed my shred of doubt.

On the surface of our lives nothing much changed; we partied and holidayed and travelled, bought pretty things and popular things and lots of useless things, and in secret waited for the first signs of age to appear — or not to appear.

Templeton was a busy man whom we rarely saw. He sent us regular reports on the progress of the laboratory but we didn’t pay much attention to them; after all, nothing was expected of it in the first years. My money rolled in and we never spent all of it; the laboratory was at base a philanthropy, a sort of “Thank You” in advance that wasn’t really meant to flourish and profit.

But it did. In its seventh year the laboratory produced not a mere moneymaker but a worldshaker — the Viral Mutation Index. I won’t pretend I understood it (something like it is still in use today), but I caught the general idea that one of Templeton’s scientists had devised a method of typing viruses into distinctive groups which each followed a predictable series of mutational changes in different varieties of circumstances, making it possible to chart ahead the progress and changes of new viruses. It wasn’t Nobel Prize stuff apparently but it put the Templeton Laboratory and Doctor Linus on the map, on the net and in the money. It gave rise to a swag of patents and the laboratory rake-off bid fair, in time, to return the whole initial outlay.

Paula and I were pleased about it, but it was just another of the good things that happened to us; our world continued on the up and up.

Then the laboratory burned down and Templeton, working alone at night, burned with it.

The police investigation found signs that could be interpreted as deliberate vandalism or a careless accident; for lack of proof the case was never determined. For us it was a warning that no true immortality exists; Templeton, who had warned us against fate, had suffered its accident. For a little while we became cautious, switching off electrical appliances, installing fail-safe gadgetry, being wary of traffic, until familiarity bred its usual contempt and we reverted to normal.

Insurance covered the laboratory pretty well and we let Doctor Linus rebuild the place; it seemed only fair somehow. When in the end he offered to buy it from me I let him have it. It was no longer important to me.

(The Supervisor snorted, “Not a real thought in his head. ‘Let it run — I can always sell it if it gets to be a bore.’ Heigh-ho for the life of the totally idle rich!”)

And then we had another warning, at first barely recognisable as a cloud on the horizon. It was one which would pursue us for ever.

I was thirty-five by then. People occasionally remarked on how young I looked and I would give a shrug and say something dismissive like, “Some have it, some don’t,” while I gave myself a little ecstatic cuddle because poor old dead Templeton’s “treatment” was working. Paula was still collecting photographs and treating herself to secret sessions of poring over them, making “then and now” comparisons of lines at the corners of eyes and mouth, integrity of hair colour, unblemished smoothness of skin, unable to believe the miracle for all my attempts to convince her. But our lifestyle didn’t change. That’s if you call “carefree” a style.

Then one of Paula’s friends got her on her own, away from the gang, one day and asked in an excited whisper where she had got her juve and could Paula give her an intro.

Juvenation procedures were risky and had been banned because of this, but that didn’t stop ever-fresh rumours of new “safe” processes that could be had — for a price — if you knew where to go. There were “hidden country retreats” where the wonder-workers performed. Well, maybe there were, but Paula knew nothing about them and the enquiry put her in a fluster. She protested that she had had no operation of the kind (which I suppose was half true) and knew of no such people as juve practitioners. The friend did not believe her — and why not when at thirty-three Paula looked a radiant early twenties — and made pointed remarks about “that laboratory of your husband’s where almost anything could be going on”. Paula was frightened enough to lose her temper and call the woman a nosey bitch jealous of Paula’s youthful looks.

That cost her a friend, in itself not a tragedy because there were plenty more available, but her deep scare was the realisation that as the years progressed this scene was likely to be replayed time and again. And she had failed the first encounter.

She hadn’t done much growing up at that stage, was still in behaviour the young girl I married. She came home in a state of repressed hysteria to throw herself into my arms in a fit of outrageous trembling. Still besotted with her, I calmed her down with baby-talk and hugging and patting until she could tell me sensibly what had occurred, and at first it didn’t really hit home.

Looking back, it seems incredible that this obvious outcome of our condition had not occurred to us. We had seen ourselves wheeling down the years in a sort of endless laughing carnival, the glittering envy of all, with never a thought of the wrinkling and encroaching frailty of those about us or what their reaction to eternal youth might be. I feel now that it was a kind of selfishness. I had never thought of us as a selfish couple, but now it seems to me that we mistook the careless generosity of easy wealth for generosity of spirit. Whether that be right or wrong, we suddenly had an enormous problem on our hands, one that meant we must consider our place in the world and how others saw us — and would continue to see us.

It was so enormous that I put it by, unwilling to think on such a scale, waiting to see what would happen, how it would all somehow come right in the end.

It didn’t come right and there was no end. Juvenation was still a sleazy underground trade for those in the know and willing to take the risk, and Paula’s would-be confidante, smarting under insult, pointed the finger of gossipy innuendo at both of us. The story that we had been juved and would not reveal our contacts went the round of our social set; people looked at our youthfulness and agreed that some interference (“hormones” was the in word of the moment) had taken place. Our denials, interpreted as refusal to talk, were not believed. With a surprising suddenness we found ourselves losing friends.

It was not a matter of backs being turned, though there was a certain amount of catty rudeness, so much as an ignoring of our social existence. Parties were given and we were not asked; when we gave parties the number of excuses was daunting. It seemed too great a reaction to a rumour; it was surely the kind of thing that would run its course and die out.

(“IQ 108!” The Supervisor was disgusted. “Even a half-witted rabbit would have known they couldn’t go on for ever while everybody aged around them.”

“Circumstances,” said the Tracer. “He was just an average bloke with a very average intellect who had never had to use it. He had easy money and nobody to pull rugs from under him; he never needed to use even the brains he had. He just coasted without watching out for rocks ahead, but now he was being woken up.”)

It wasn’t, and it didn’t. It got worse, even a little sinister. I asked one of the few acquaintances who still would talk to me what was going on.

He wasn’t keen to say much, but eventually he told me that people had been checking back and nobody could remember any time when Paula and I had been away for the month or so necessary for a complete juve. They felt it was a bit eerie, the way we were “preserved”, as though something unnatural had taken place. Quite a few of them had flirted with the popular cults at one time or another, sufficiently to taste satanic ritual and the charlatanism of the supernatural and come away with their brains more or less intact, but the mysteriously satisfying feeling that “there could be something in it”.

And so now we were “dangerous” people better kept at arm’s length.

I tried talking to Paula and she only kept repeating, “We don’t have a friend left. Not one!”

I said, “They aren’t real friends; I don’t think they ever were.”

She screamed at me, “That doesn’t help! It will just get worse as they grow older and older!”

So it would. I had a sudden vision of our agelessness being talked about by the servants, seeping out to the tradesmen, spreading until some news vulture got hold of it and we became feed for the net and the gawping of millions. And then the police interest and the juve laws.

I said, “We can go away, never come back.”

At once she became unreasonable. “You mean leave everything we have here, everyone we know? Go to live among strangers?”

I said, “They’ve all become strangers, haven’t they?” and she began to cry, clinging to some belief that if we hung on it would all go away.

Then I had to comfort her.

It took a lot of comforting, a lot of pointing out the problems and eventually the dangers of our situation, and then a lot of love-making to make her see reason. She was simply afraid of change, like a little girl, wanting everything to continue as it was for ever and ever. She was a desolate little girl, but one with whom I was still entranced to the point of never thinking of refusing her anything — except that this time I was afraid of the future’s problems. I could see nothing for it but to cut and run, and at last she gave in the inevitable.

Even then she cried out, looking for someone to blame, “That rotten Doctor Templeton! He knew, but he never told us!”

I knew we should have seen it for ourselves.

You can see that by now we were really convinced that we were going to live for ever. Or, at any rate, a long time. A hell of a long time.

(“In God’s name,” asked the Supervisor, “why couldn’t he have picked somebody suitable for his treatment?”

“Money, money, money. He wanted it and he got it.”

“Soulless bastard!”

The Tracer pointed out that every man has his moral blind spot. “And to him, obsessed with his research, it wasn’t a con; it was only a way out of his cash drought. Lot of good it did him!”)

(II)

We had to decide where to go. It had to be some place where we weren’t known, which at once ruled out all of Australia. We had society acquaintances in all of the capital cities and we certainly were not going to live in the backblocks, rusticating in some country town with the farmers and small shopkeepers. I didn’t care much where we settled, so long as we found company and comfort, but Paula could not make up her mind about any country or city.

Her actual acceptance of our situation did not come until I said, quite casually, “We’ll see them all eventually,” and she replied that she wasn’t going to spend her life running from place to place; she meant to settle down; it was bad enough having to leave Australia …

It simply hadn’t struck her that we would have to move on every few years as people around us began to comment on our youthfulness. You have to realise that Paula had come from a minor stage career at the age of twenty to sudden wealth and a life wherein she had needed to think only of what suited her. I can see now that it was a life of utter selfishness and that I actively encouraged her in it; she had literally stopped thinking beyond the immediate minute because thought had become unnecessary. Now, with consequences and the necessity to think ahead forced on her, her response was to become hysterical.

My attempts to calm her were hopeless; she simply screamed at me and locked herself away. In an avalanche of terrified foresight, she saw her future of luxury and pleasure take on the features of a beast pursuing her down the years. She recovered, of course — we always do when there’s nothing else for it — and listened to my plans in the mutinous silence of a little girl deprived.

Paula liked people around her, but she never made close friends; I think that in those days she never had an intimate companionship. I, on the other hand, had a few good friends who would go out of my life and never be seen again. This distressed me more than I can explain. What was worse was the perception that this would be a recurring pattern as every few years we would need to move on and reappear in a new place, in new company, under a new name. I said nothing about that; Paula’s sullenness was burden enough.

Why we chose India I no longer know. Possibly because we had never been there and knew nobody there. We would become Mr and Mrs John Hammond, late of Australia and now resident in Bombay. The rest was for the lawyers to manage. They were curious about the projected name change (I imagine they were curious about many things, having their ears to the ground), but there was no illegality in that and they contented themselves with raised eyebrows. Their main business was to arrange the continuing transfer of rands to a Bombay bank so that they could be drawn on in the name of Hammond.

At that time it had never occurred to me that there were goods and services money could not pay for. Or that any reasonable right could be denied a law-abiding citizen. Or that human fortune balanced on knife edges.

So off we went to Bombay, which had a largish European component among its fifteen or so millions, mostly in business and fairly well off, and our first need was to make the right social contacts. Strangely, some of the young people in our law firm tipped us off how to go about that. (It seemed peculiar to be sitting in those drily computerised offices and listening to advice from those I would have thought to have little conception of our social stratum.)

Once I had explained the idea to Paula, she perked up considerably; she had always had a manipulative streak and the prospect of penetrative action was right up her street. We started by attending some contemporary art shows and buying some much publicised items at prices that just pipped the limits of big local collectors. That made the art news in the local papers, made us people to be pointed out at such gatherings and established the fact that we had money. And possession of money made us people of note in the right quarters. So much for the speculation about us.

We also joined the Opera Society, which was busily fostering western opera in the larger cities, and made a substantial donation to the local backers. Though neither of us was inherently drawn to Wagner et al., Paula’s stage experience made her able to comment on aspects of production and presentation. The women were the powerful force in this area and the women listened to her as a fresh voice.

Inside of a month we were in — invited here, invited there, noted in the press, hunted by the social commentators. Our legal advisers had certainly justified their advice. (Thinking back, did I detect a faint note of repressed derision from those young lawyers as they laid out their plan for netting the local rabbits? At the time, no, but I have had years for recollection and reflection.) Curiously, the local Indian politesse were slower to welcome us, almost as though they perceived us as buying our way into their goodwill (this again is hindsight), but soon we were taken up by the younger generation, those of our own age. Well, our apparent age.

Paula was in her element, behaving publicly with an exact appreciation of what was required of her and privately with the squealing joy of one who had conquered in a great battle of wits. And because she was back to her normal self again, I rejoiced with her.

It was almost as though we had taken up life again where the Australian days had broken off.

(The Supervisor’s voice intruded into the recitation from the holospace: “Here follow ten minutes of unimportant talk of the Indian experience, which we have deleted from this recording. Other such deletions have been made to preserve continuity. For those interested they are preserved on the full recording.”)

All in all, we had a good life in India; we were among our own social kind and, once we had learned the local ways, we fitted in, snug as bugs in a rug. Of course, there was a down side to India (there’s a down side to any place, isn’t there?) but we didn’t see too much of that. Most of the one and a half billion population (I suppose there are more than that now) lived in grinding poverty and in spite of government rules they bred like flies. We would see them occasionally, thin and boney and sick, but the police kept them out of the upper-class part of the city.

Constant sight of them would have been hard to bear when there was nothing that ordinary human kindness could do for such vast numbers. Paula and I were among the fortunate who coasted through life, cherishing our little secret and saving it for bursts of private laughter when we thought of those who would pay millions to share its benefit. It wasn’t cruel laughter; we were just happy to be alive — in world without end.

But the world of India had its end, for us. We were ready for it and did not fuss too greatly; it was a damned nuisance but one we had to face, a small payment in view of the lasting gift. The whispers about youthfulness began after about ten years, and the puzzled frowns over questions bubbling in our friends’ mouths, but which they hesitated to ask. So we simply got out. Our firm of ageing lawyers made all the arrangements from Australia (passports, visas, bank transfers and such); they arranged sale of our house and purchase of a comfortable small Long Island mansion — and Mr and Mrs Hunter, late of Australia, moved to New York.

That was about 2035, I think; why try to pin down dates when time doesn’t matter? We lived in quite a lot of countries at different times — America, Spain, Scotland for a while (too cold), France, Argentina, Egypt (too bloody hot) and all sorts of island resorts. Seeing the world became our pleasure and our habit; we stopped waiting for our welcomes to decay into questionings and instead took a sip of each country or district and its people and moved on. There was always more to see, a new place to go. As I said — world without end.

But it did end, in 2078.

(III)

The first intimation that change was about to come to us — to our lifestyle, to our whole world — was a vox message from my law firm: they wanted us to return to Australia to attend a shareholders’ meeting of 21st Century Finance. I had never attended any such meetings (except one right at the beginning, out of curiosity); the minutes would be sent to me, but I read only enough to see that everything was going well and the dividends remained high. I ignored the recorded call. Then the firm voxed me to contact them in person, a request they had never made before.

So I made a person-to-person visual, to be confronted by a middle-aged stranger who announced himself as a senior member of the firm, and I realised with a small shock that we had been away more than forty years and that the firm’s personnel had aged and passed on and the business had moved into the hands of sons and daughters, or even been sold so that only the name remained. He told me, very briefly, as if remembering that calls cost money, that it would be in my interest to attend the meeting, that 21st Century Finance was the subject of a State prosecution and that all its assets had been frozen.

What I understood was that half my income had been cut from under me because of some maladministration by the company. As a purely passive participant in the business, I knew nothing about its actual day to day workings and nothing about the company law which was now looking into its operations; I knew that 21st Century existed by an involved system of financing large-scale projects and that the intricacies of its own financing were hard to follow — and you could say pretty accurately that represented all I knew. My first reaction was to instruct the lawyer to arrange for proxy attendance at the meeting, but he insisted that the matter was very serious and that my personal presence was desirable.

I gave in as much because lawyers are nearly impossible to argue with as because he roused in me a buried desire to see Australia again after so long a time away. And I was a little concerned by the frozen assets business, though I was confident that his firm would deal with that in good time.

When I told Paula she was horror struck at the loss of income, however temporary. When I had succeeded in calming her down, she showed an unreasoning fear of return to Australia. She cried out that people would recognise us, questions would be asked, police would investigate us, and juve laws would close around us … In the end she said, “You go if you want to, but I’ll stay here. I’m not going back to be arrested!”

Never in all our time together had she suggested that we be separated even for a day or two, let alone a period that might stretch into weeks.

I suppose that at this point I have to discuss our private relationship. We had been married then for over fifty years, and pretty good years they had been, full of travel and laughter and sightseeing and all the things you can do when there’s nothing to stop you doing them. We loved each other, which counted for a lot.

When I say “we loved each other” I don’t mean the totally involved way of the first years together; that would be a silly pretence. Nobody maintains such a high peak for so long, but we still enjoyed a sex life and a real caring for each other. We loved each other and our closeness was not just the closeness of a shared secret which had over the years become like a shared joke between us, a sort of hidden superiority of ourselves over other people, an acknowledgement that we played in the world but were not really of it. There were times when we fell into a way of nose-in-air superiority and were brought back to reason by the cold shoulders of those who resented it; we made mistakes, but the mistakes carried their own retribution. I have to admit, too, in time the sexual relationship developed a secret elasticity; I played in strange beds and I knew, after a while, that Paula did, too. It was something we never admitted to each other; it was not a denial of our faithfulness so much as an occasional refreshment of it. That was how I saw it and our mutual affair never slackened because of it.

And now she was afraid to return home. I had never appreciated the depth to which Paula was affected by our secret. It had very early on become for me an integral part of my life, an ongoing acceptance that wore out its first aspect of wonder and became my manner of being, my way of existence that no longer required thinking about, except every few years when a change of scene was dictated. I began to see that for Paula it was a daily miracle, an affirmation that each morning she awakened to youth and beauty, as though a day might come when the miracle ceased its magic and in her mirror she would see the first wrinkle spreading its shadow of impending age. She was a good actress who betrayed nothing, but I knew now that she lived in fear of eternity lost, as well as in fear of Australia and discovery and the law.

There was nothing for it but for me to make the trip alone. We were in Hawaii at the time, an easy hop to Melbourne. We were still using the name of Hammond, since we had never returned to any of our round-the-world venues to risk recognition, and I decided to keep it for the time being. The trans-Pacific hop took only ninety minutes and a taxi shuttled me to the lawyers’ establishment; there I was ushered directly to the office of Jason Bradley, the head of the firm.

As I entered the room he switched on the privacy insulator, doing it slowly to be sure I saw him. I knew there could be no pretence here and knew equally well that our communication was privileged; nevertheless, I was uneasy about the meeting.

Old Jason was about seventy. He motioned me to a chair, regarded me with the kind of interest you’d give to a curio and said, “You would not remember me.”

I didn’t.

He said, “I had just joined my grandfather’s firm when I first saw you. I remembered you because he pointed you out as an example of the perfect waster, heir to an immense amount of money, who exercised neither control over nor interest in it so long as the dividends were paid and nobody bothered you.”

Expecting questioning of my youthfulness, I had received instead an insult. Such a man needed to be very sure of his position to risk it, so I swallowed anger and replied that with his firm hired to attend to the minutiae of my life, there was no reason for me to do my own spadework.

He nodded. “And with virtual eternity for your playground the possibility of change did not occur to you?”

With a distinct sense of shock I asked him, “What do you mean by virtual eternity?”

“I mean Doctor Templeton’s treatment. Don’t panic, Mister Colson; the privacy insulation is first class. I am the only possessor of the facts of your existence and in the legal sense they are no business of mine for public airing. The Doctor’s treatment did not, in the strictest sense, contravene the law, though the law would have acted very swiftly to make it a contravention had it been aware.”

His knowledge did not distress me too greatly while he was prepared to keep it to himself, but I had to ask how he came by it.

It appeared that after our dealings over the setting up of the laboratory Templeton had adopted the Bradley firm for his own personal dealings. After his death, the new owners, Doctor Linus and friends, discovered a number of encrypted voxcode recordings in his private safe. Deeming these, with doubtful legality, to be the property of the laboratory, Linus tried to read them but could not, so he engaged the services of a cryptographer who broke the code but fortunately did not have the technical expertise to understand what he read. One recording contained the detail of Templeton’s treatment for the prolongation of an unageing life, with an account of the Colson dealings. Linus saw at once the impossibility of publicising such a procedure across a planet not only over-populated but overburdened with increasing numbers of nonagenarians; but, understandably, he did not want to destroy the record of incidental side issues.

“He brought it to me,” said Bradley, “as the person in charge of the laboratory’s legal affairs — after first extracting all the less questionable data. I saw the matter from the point of view of responsibility to a client. I recognised at once your possible private complications and suggested that he leave the tape with me for placement in a private strongbox until such time as its content could be safely released, which might be never. He was glad to be rid of it. He died, as I assume you know, two years ago, leaving myself as the only possessor of your secret.”

After a moment he added, “I suppose I should be pleased, on your behalf, to see that Templeton’s meddling was successful, but frankly I am not. I am, despite my profession, an ordinary man who dislikes sitting on secrets. For your sake and your wife’s, I have kept all your business in my own hands. I have wondered now and then whom to hand it on to when my own span ends, but I feel that may no longer be a problem. Frankly, Mister Colson, in a year or two, allowing for the law’s delays, you may have no business at all with Bradley, Bradley and Macrone.”

He paused as if he waited for a response from me, but I had none. Until his final few words I had fixed my mind mainly on his preservation of the anonymity of Paula and myself, but now I was brought uneasily to the major purpose of this visit. I didn’t much mind his obvious dislike of me, but it promised no joy in what was to come. I could only stare uncomfortably.

He said, “You know that the assets of 21st Century Finance have been frozen by order of the court and that precludes your taking any profit from their transactions.”

I had to say, “Yes, but I don’t understand.”

“You don’t bother to follow Australian news?”

Why the hell should I? I didn’t answer.

“So you are not aware that the chairman and two members of the board of directors are under arrest, though free on bail of half a million dollars? The charges are fraud, conspiracy, embezzlement, and a dozen more. I trust that you do at least know —” (there was open contempt in his voice) “— that the company made its profit by backing large, expensive projects on a scale too great for the average entrepreneur. Some twenty years ago it became one of two backers of Pacific Plankton; that disastrous attempt to augment the food chain at its lowest level failed through poor research, directorial silliness and managerial milking of assets. It railed for over a billion dollars, with your firm to foot half the bill. Instead of declaring the facts, the board decided to hide from the inevitable market decline by falsifying books and trusting to other investments to tide them over. Not only did other bad investments fail, mainly through a spate of poor judgments, but the cover-up enabled some less honourable members of the board to paddle their fingers in a rapidly shrinking till. The end result is a bankruptcy estimated by the government auditor at a minimum of two and a half billion dollars. Your shareholding will be a bare nibble at the edges of the debt.”

You hear of such things, but they happen to other people. Then suddenly they happen to you. There is no sensible reaction to something so big.

So I said, “Then I’ve only lost half my income,” almost as if that were a plus.

Old Bradley looked as though he didn’t believe what he heard. After a while he said, “You have not asked who was the second backer of Pacific Plankton.”

“Should I? Who was it?”

Even as I asked the question I knew the answer, and felt a shiver taking over my whole body.

Bradley said, “It was the other firm holding your investments, Pegasus Equity. There is suspicion of collusion between the two and warrants have been issued. Also, the assets of Pegasus Equity have been frozen as of this morning. As you would have known if you took any interest in your own country.”

The shivering was uncontrollable; I could only clasp my hands and stare at him.

He continued cruelly, as if wiping me clean from his slate, “You have no source of income and on present indications are not likely to retrieve any in the future.”

It was a dismissal. He looked down at his desk like a man finding other business for his attention. I got up, still shaking and cold with shock, and made for the door, but he had a last word for me.

“If you have a bank account in the name of Hammond I would advise a total withdrawal before the auditor’s hounds get wind of it — and of your double identity.”

I got out of there in a state of mental blankness and wound up on a seat in one of the city plazas, watching people go by, unable to think. Mostly I was hurt by Bradley’s unveiled dislike and contempt. All the rest would in some fashion take care of itself; my life had no place for catastrophe. But Bradley’s attitude … I was what I was because I had no call to be otherwise; why should he or anyone adopt a superior moral position?

It was late evening before I returned to my hotel and on an empty stomach drank whisky in mutinous solitude, refusing to acknowledge anyone in the bar. Mutiny turned to self pity and I went to bed for lack of a better thought.

I woke about three in the morning, sorry for myself, and took a hangover tablet. Bradley’s last words had risen to the surface of my empty mind and, before the alcohol had finally lifted, I called Internet Finance and transferred my Hawaii bank balance to a Melbourne bank. The “Hammond” account was some four hundred thousand dollars; it seemed enough to go on with. Then I vidded Paula, told her what I had done and that she must come to Melbourne immediately.

She crescendoed from insulted disbelief to hysterical tantrum, screamed at me in language that would have shamed the gutter and cut the connection.

I remember thinking calmly that she would come as soon as she realised her cashless position, and thinking also that after sixty-and-odd years my attitude towards Paula had changed. Even hopeless passion has its limits. We were good friends.

At last we were just good friends.

No, something more. We were partners, shackled together by the fact of our uniqueness, by the simple truth that, save in the short run of a decade or so before the necessary moving on, we had only each other in the whole world — and on and on into the future.

At the end of a week she came, vengefully smouldering — and heard me out in silence as I told her just what had happened. When I had done she burst into tears. And when the tears were done she said, “We must plan.”

Indeed we must — but when the end came we had no ideas; we were not equipped to deal with the real world.

The end was a dozen directors and accountants of both firms in gaol, one suicide, total collapse of both establishments and the ruin of small stockholding thousands. For Paula and I, it was the Hellgate’s opening.

4

(I)

The trials and sentencing occupied about a year and by the end of that year we were close to broke.

It was not only that we were unused to being careful with money, it was partly the decline in the value of money itself. Attempts had been made to curb inflation in most countries, usually with only temporary success, but by 2079 our four hundred thousand was worth less than half of its value sixty years before.

We bought a small, decrepit house, little more than a shack, on the outskirts of a country town, furnished it in our estimation cheaply, and sat down to think. Say, rather, to discover the limits of thinking.

You people today, fifty or so years later, have little idea of the changes in the world; you welcome the new gadget, the new gimmick, call it progress and swallow it into your experience without a glance at the past. Why bother with the past now that the real problems have been solved and the present flows evenly by? Let the old folk “remember when …” and grumble at the intolerant present while their grandchildren gaze out from the Corridors on a safely unchanging future. But in 2079 the forecast bottoming out of population growth had not occurred; there had been slowing down but no cure for the climb to thirteen billions and attempts by governments to stem natural fecundity had foundered in protest, riot and violence. The world’s forests were gone, the seas had been fished to near vanishment of life, vagaries of the Greenhouse weather made food crops always problematical, science was moribund for lack of funding and the wealth of nations was spent in feeding the fifty percent of people born to be jobless all their lives — and still children were born to those to whom the extinction of the race was “just the talk of them innerlecshals”. That fifty percent had been created at first by runaway automation and then by the self-replicating manufacturing techniques fostered by greed almost to the point where little buying public existed among the State-warded many.

(Paula and I had been careful to have no children. We found sound social reasons for the decision, but the truth was that in our hearts we feared Templeton’s manipulation and magic. We feared monsters born of unnatural science.)

(The Supervisor snorted, “Magic and monsters! Unnatural science! They already had the mentalities of Corridor people, grabbing at the supernatural for anything they didn’t understand. What they really feared was the paradox of children growing up with unchanging parents.”)

What all this meant to Paula and myself — and the condition of the world always comes down to a personal crisis — was that when our money ran out, which would be very soon, we would be reduced to applying for government sustenance (the Suss as the low-lifes called it), which would involve the filling in of application forms, including Date of Birth … which would be checked against Central Data …

… and it would be found that as Hammond we did not exist in Central Data …

… or that as Colson we presented as patently healthy youngsters in our ninth decades of life!

We speculated and theorised for hours as to what action the government would take in our case. The procreation laws were strict to a point just short of child murder (but were still defied); euthanasia was practised to a degree where doctors shrugged and turned their backs and the law turned a blind eye; even genetic research (what there was of it in a poverty-stricken world) was policed almost to extinction — and here were we, avatars of life virtually unending, subjects for study that would quickly give up its secret in a world that could not afford the life it had, let alone the miracle of forever.

Our case fell between the cracks of extant law, so they would simply kill us. In a world wherein the gap between the haves and have-nots was unbridgeably deep, few cared what happened to the poor. As two who had long ago ceased to give a damn for any lives but our own we knew that we would simply vanish without sound or trace.

We did not want to die. Even in Suss circumstances life was precious. We told ourselves that the Suss civilisation was a phase, a historic period which would give way to new eras of hope and prosperity; we would suffer, but we would see it out. In the meantime there had to be a way of existing until the new future arrived, but for all our desperate discussion we could not see it.

What way? Paula’s stage experience in chorus lines and bit parts meant nothing in a profession inundated by out-of-work hopefuls; she auditioned persistently until the rage for new techniques and new styles of acting convinced her that she had nothing to offer to stage or holoscreen. She gave up the attempt and lapsed into a mulish silence, only unwillingly stirring herself to clean our grimy little house. Much of the time she spent trying on the remnants of an expensive wardrobe she had fiercely insisted on keeping over my attempts to get her to sell off the vast collection of clothes; she lived in dreams of the past.

And I? What did I have to offer the world of industry and commerce? I am a smallish, slender man, strong enough for most pursuits but utterly inexperienced in anything useful. I had never done anything useful. In the world of 2079, you went to school (if your parents could afford it) with an employment goal in mind from a suffocatingly early age, and trained yourself towards it. When your time came, you went straight into your waiting profession, hand-picked by employers whose scouts had silently overseen your performance for years — or you went on to the scrap heap.

I was for the scrap heap, and knew it. In a highly mechanised society there were no jobs for the unskilled.

I grew vegetables in our backyard, discovering that even so simple a chore required knowledge and a measure of dedication, but carried on with it because I had no better way to pass the time. For the rest, I could only watch miserably as our money slipped away; you can imagine that we were poor managers.

Paula grew increasingly uncommunicative as the months passed. I tried to jolly her out of it, but she only glared at me and went to the bedroom to fondle her dresses. We never quarrelled openly; we knew that bad blood between us would create an impossible situation; an endless enmity was unthinkable.

In a chokingly short time the money disappeared. No more time existed for indecision and we had been unable to make up our minds to anything. The more we talked or argued, the more it seemed all avenues of decision were closed.

But now that only action remained possible, I told her what I proposed to do. She said, as though it was no matter of importance, “They’ll kill us both.”

I pointed out that the alternative was starvation, more protracted and surely less pleasant. She said nothing to that but at least did not try to prevent me.

Her uncaring, life-is-over attitude engendered in me the pity for my little girl that had always been my reaction to her downcast moods, but this time it carried an underlay of irritation, an understanding that she wanted all the high life of our past but had no mental backbone to fight to preserve it. It was for me to battle for both of us.

It may seem peculiar to you because you don’t share my bizarre circumstances, but I felt that I had attained a new stage of growing up in the world.

(II)

If we were not to starve we must go on the Suss, the fortnightly government handout of food-and-necessities accompanied by a little money for “emergency extras”, but there were dangers in making the necessary application. Paula’s “They’ll kill us” was an exaggeration born of creeping distress, but the State would have to take some action once our life condition was revealed, as it surely must be, and surely that must involve some form of incarceration. But there was nothing else for it; the application would have to be made. Even if paid work had been available, in a time when selection of the fortunate percentage was made by psychological machinery and intrusive questioning neither of us had training or a talent to offer.

And so I went into the village, to the Communications Office where such requests were handled. I knew the pitfalls, the details that must remain hidden, and wound my mind round a whole spate of clever dodges for evading and bamboozling the staff.

At the last moment, on the doorstep, it occurred to me that there might be no staff, only a bank of machines with buttons to be pushed and merciless holoflash questions to be answered in a humanless void. The possibility queased my stomach into near illness, and I entered the little hall almost in a state of shock.

There was a human staff, a middle-aged woman who sat behind a desk with a holospace against the white wall at one end and before her a largish, complicated keyboard. Nothing else. The banks of machinery, the data files and processing activities, were miles away in Melbourne city; it was a wonder our village environment provided work for even a single operator. The almost empty ambience completed my depression.

The woman looked at me without interest, probably wondering what so well dressed a man could want of a Comm Office that his private installations could not provide. I explained to her what I wanted — enrolment on the Suss register for myself and my wife — and made a stammering mess even of that, unable to treat her with the casual certainty I commonly used with the worker breed. She seemed suddenly a class enemy, ready to claw.

At the sound of my voice her eyes widened a little; it would be only rarely that she heard an upper class accent — the kind she would call “posh” — in the village.

When I had finished my roundabout declaration, she said, “You’re not the first to come down in the world. You’d be surprised how many.” “How many useless, classy bastards” her tone said. “Full name?”

This was the first hurdle. I said, a bit creakily, “John Vincent Colson.”

She fingered it on to the keyboard and sat back while something somewhere hummed. In a few seconds the holospace flashed: Personal details John Vincent Colson db 8.10.1990.

She said, “A slip-up there somewhere,” as though slip-ups were all in the day’s work, and I said quickly, “That’s my grandfather. All our men carry the same three names.”

“They do?” I could see her thinking that was the sort of dynastic nonsense the moneybags would go for. She typed: Recheck.

The halo vanished and in seconds repeated the same information.

The woman said contemptuously, “Bloody amateur recorders! See the name and look no further. They’ll have your father and you all lumped under the one name.” She pondered a moment and asked, “Have you ever been abroad?”

I had been working out how to introduce the idea into her head, afraid of seeming pushy, of trying to tell her how to do her job — and she had done it for me. I said, “I was in America a few years back.”

“You’ll have had to register there.”

“Yes.”

She said into the air, “USA connection!” and in seconds the holo flashed: USA open. “So — date of birth?”

I had to hope my memory of that trip was correct and I said as firmly as I could manage, “Tenth March, twenty-fifty-two.” It was the day and month I always used overseas, only varying the year as I grew older. I remained always aged twenty-five at signing-in, which made me a believable twenty-nine now.

She typed and the holo flashed down a list. The USA is a big country crowded with people and there were plenty of John Vincent Colsons, but only one born in “fifty-six”. The flashdown included Paula and the dates and “factual” information we had manufactured for her.

The woman — I never knew her name — said, “Transfer!” and our data were entered into the Australian system. We were legal! And entitled to Suss benefits. Against odds, our luck had held.

The rest took only a few minutes. I was leaving when the woman called, “Just a minute!” and I stopped dead, afraid of some last minute disaster, wanting to run but not daring. I turned slowly back — and she asked, “When you were in the money, did you ever do any sailing?”

“I owned a racing yacht for a few years.”

I suppose it was a fair if unexpected question.

Yachting was one of the expensive pursuits of the wealthy, and I had played along until at the end of a stay somewhere or other I had sold the yacht and taken up some other hobby.

She asked, “Did you ever get seasick?”

“Never.”

Then she said something which legend had it was heard by only one Susser in a million: “There’s a job come into Melbourne area. One qualification is you mustn’t get seasick. Interested? There’s not too many Sussers ever had sea experience and everybody else travels by plane.”

I suppose I was dumbfounded; like an idiot I asked, “What sort of job?’.

She literally threw her hands in the air, despairing of all high-class twits. “Christ! A job, ninny! A bloody job! Do you care what sort?”

I nearly choked in my effort to say, “No I don’t care. Of course I don’t.”

And I didn’t. Any job was better than subhuman existence on the Suss. Even to a man who had never had one.

She called, “Employment list!” and the holo sprang to life. She typed a number and the display read: Ocean Growth Arafura Branch. General hands. Seagoing experience essential… and a deal more that I was too excited to take in.

The woman said, “The interview’s in Melbourne. I’ll give you the address.”

(“I don’t get it.” The Tracer was appalled. “Would an operator brush off an identity search as easily as that?”

“Fifty years ago!” the Supervisor reminded him. “A single-operator station in a tin shed village in the sticks where subsistence farmers couldn’t afford full-comm home set-ups. And a woman bored out of her skull just sitting there, mostly passing on messages. She probably resented anybody actually coming to the place at all, disturbing her vid viewing. This one just took the easiest option — and let Colson off the hook.”)

Along with the address the woman gave me a travel voucher to get me to Melbourne and I took the train (an old electric, must have been nearly the last of them) into the city.

The Personnel Manager interviewed me right away. It seemed there were precious few Sussers with sea experience, and most of those were too old for what he wanted — young, active blokes who could get around. He checked my credentials (which were only an hour old on the computers!), listened to my voice and gave me one of the half dozen jobs offering. Just like that!

He said at one stage, “The Bridge nifties will probably snap you up. They like posh voices around them.”

I didn’t know what he meant and didn’t care. I was only full of the miracle. I had gone to apply for the Suss and instead landed a job. It would have to be a record of some kind.

The one unpleasantness had been during the medical inspection when the doctor said, “You’re on the skinny side but a job of work will cure that.” I resented that, although he meant only that I did not carry a load of unused, surplus muscle like some farm labourer.

(III)

As soon as I got home, excited as a kid, I broke the news to Paula that we were going to have real money coming in, not just the Suss. That brightened her up more than anything that had happened in the past year.

Then I explained that I would be away for three weeks in every four, ferried home for a week after each three-week stint. “The job is up north, in the Arafura Sea, on a sea production rig, growing food for the Sussers.”

She heard all that with a puzzled frown because, I thought, I was too excited to explain things properly. But she said, “How much?”

“How much what?”

“The pay, silly!”

I actually hadn’t asked, but I knew it would be base rate starting, with proficiency increments every six months. I explained that I had arranged for the money to be transmitted to her because all necessities were provided on the rig. It wouldn’t be a big sum at first, but it would improve in time.

“So now your husband’s a working man, looking after his own!”

She said, “Yes, isn’t he?” in a return to that far away fashion that meant she wasn’t really hearing me, but looking inward to some thought of her own.

I know now that that was just what she was doing, looking inward to a thought of her own.

I didn’t pay much attention then. I had only two days to finalise any family arrangements and report to the Arafura flight. I must admit that I was looking forward to this new experience of discovering how “the other half” actually lived; it had the charm of mysterious novelty.

(The Tracer exploded, “He’s a right bastard, that one, isn’t he?”

“Took you long enough to notice.”

“He talks only about what directly affects himself, only mentions even his wife when she’s doing something that upsets him. Sees she’s been having a bad time, but all he can talk about is looking forward to his job as if it was to be some sort of party game. We don’t even know what she looks like. In fact we don’t know what anybody looks like except for a quick rundown on Doctor Templeton, who excited him. He doesn’t even comment on his lifespan, just accepts it as something paid for and delivered.”

“The perfect self-centred individual.”

“Self-centred! He doesn’t even see anybody else!”

The Supervisor laughed. “Let that be a lesson to you against accumulating unearned riches and meeting with the Devil”)

(IV)

I didn’t know much about the Arafura Project beyond the netnews fact that it was another attempt to use the oceans to bolster the food rations. This hadn’t been a thing to interest me too much; I had always been able to buy what I wanted (though the privately run shops were sometimes wildly expensive even for the well off) and it was the government’s business to look after the poor. It interested me now in a touristy kind of way; I think I saw myself as some sort of high-lifer taking an amusing taste of low life.

The AP certainly looked fascinating from the air as we circled over it before landing. It was immense beyond anything I had imagined, a vast man-made structure whose edges began a few kilometres off the north coast of Australia’s Arnhem Land and stretched away into the distance, way beyond where we could see even from thirty thousand feet. And this was only, I had been told, a kind of pilot plant, a trial run for the construction of AP spawn that would spread across the oceans of the world! And it was green, just a green blanket resting for a thrilling distance on the surface of endless water.

There were some others with me in the jet, middle-class working types who left me alone when they heard my “posh” accent, probably taking me for some kind of senior exec, also a couple of Sussers who had somehow passed the Personnel screening and sat together yammering in accents you could have cut with a blunt knife. I knew that, historically, there had been a laissez faire Australia where all the social groups mixed together in a more or less common speech form, but financial pressures had long ago put an end to that; the Suss had drifted into being the uninterested, uneducated stratum, and the wage workers observed a careful if not particularly subservient division from their betters. I supposed I might have to make some effort to meet these people on their own terms.

But that was for tomorrow; the present day was the jet diving down to a great central stretch of clear water from the mid-point of which rose a building large enough to cover a couple of city blocks. We tied up at a pier that could have harboured a huge freighter (and did so, I discovered later) and disembarked. Carrying our own baggage — and that was for me a new experience — we were taken into the building and into a featureless room where we sat on benches and waited for the Personnel Officer at his central desk to pay some attention to us.

Which he eventually did, calling each of us by name. I was the last called. All the others after a short exchange went out the way we came in and I understood later that they were ferried across to quarters on the green “mainland” of the Project, but to me he said, “You have no work experience of any kind?”

I said simply, “No.” It was all on the vidscreen in front of him; why ask?

He said, not very nicely, “We’ll give you a try in the junior mess. I suppose you’ve eaten in restaurants often enough to know what’s required of a waiter?”

I said I thought I had. He looked as if he didn’t believe me but said, “Report to the Number Two dining room at 0700 in the morning; at least you’ll know what the words on the menu mean,” and handed me over to a gopher who took me via lifts and corridors to a small room with a bed and minimum furniture, somewhere on the top floor. He said, “This is yours, mate,” and left me to it.

All very efficient and smartly processed; I was a cog in the works.

I settled myself in, which took about five minutes, and set myself to find my way about the building, wishing I’d thought to ask some directions of the gopher. (I spent a lot of time in the first week wishing I’d thought to ask the obvious; it takes time to learn to think like a worker.) I found the Number Two dining room eventually down on the first floor, and the staff dining room where I was too late for the midday meal. As I left there, I heard someone snigger, “Another poshie for the fat pigs.” I supposed there would be a lot of that for a while, until I settled in. Being only a small man I would have to keep my temper and bear with it.

During the afternoon I walked across the pontoon bridge connecting with the mainland — and discovered why freedom from seasickness was a job requirement. The whole mainland, seemingly endless miles of it in every direction, rolled with the swell of the ocean beneath it; the entire Arafura Project was a vast, undulating platform a few centimetres thick and covered with a layer of thin, heavily fertilised soil which, in turn, supported endless fields of fruit and vegetables laboratory-developed to ripen only a handsbreadth above the soil.

I vaguely recalled reading some news releases telling these things, but it had not been the sort of information to interest me greatly and now, in the middle of it so to speak, it seemed a pretty impressive technological feat.

But the world was full of such things, wasn’t it? You didn’t have to stand and gaze with your mouth open.

There was a scientist of some kind doing soil measurements and he, when he heard my accent, was willing to answer a few questions.

It seemed that the reason for the thinness of the Project’s billowing under-structure was cheapness of construction, using some carbon-strengthened material, as strong as steel and with most of its bulk taken up by tiny air bubbles to provide flotation. Most of the “land” surface was taken up by forced-growth vegetables for shipping out and some experimental hemp for processing into cloth for the Suss people; even the underside was used for growing some sort of edible algae as a bulk food, also for the Sussers. I discovered also that the Arafura is a cyclone area, which made it seem a pretty foolish place to float a garden, but the Project had done some kind of deal with local authorities to have Weather Control steer the big blows away from the farm and disperse over the sea.

But I don’t need to tell you all this; you know about it because all the oceans today are covered by float farms and half the world eats from them. It’s just that Arafura was the first.

(The Supervisor signed, “How right you are. We can also do without the harrowing account of his first days as a waiter in Diner Two — all the spilt soup and mixed-up orders and the rudeness of middle-management sub-nabobs, to say nothing of the kitchen gibes at his prissy accent. I think we should have edited it out on the first run. The trouble with Deep Question is the bloody questioners who can’t tell relevance from garbage and let the twits run on until their throats give out.”

He ran the voice fast forward for a few seconds. “I think this should do.”

Colson’s voice, caught in mid-sentence, said, “— what Paula was doing —”

“Uhuh, too far!” said the Tracer. “Back a bit, Sir. This is a really important part.”)

So you can see that finding out how the other half lives is no joke. Even table-waiting is deceptive; the real rush and bustle goes on out of sight, in the kitchen and pantry. The bitching of the low-life staff behind the scenes and the rudeness of the management diners was hard to take at first, but I learned the knack of letting it roll off me as if I didn’t hear. Looking back, I think it was a big help that my mind was in some degree busy with Paula.

I vidded home a few times and contacted only the answering machine. She would ring back and be vague about her activities; she would ask uninterested questions about my doings and we would ring off with nothing really said. I found myself obsessed with whatever was going on behind her uncommunicating face, convinced that she was hiding some private, secret train of thought from me; the hours on shift, where I had to watch what I did, became a relief from the continual wondering.

I was behaving like a suspicious husband — and that realisation, coming to me while I was restless in bed, brought on a fit of coughing laughter. Me a suspicious husband! As though I cared! As though our lives really intersected on any plane save the fact that we were two of a kind, unique and bound by our common secrecy!

It was a discovery, an awakening. I had always been a placid type, content that things flowed along without any hitches, accepting what was and never getting too excited over anything. The only really big node in my existence had been my passion for Paula and that, I suddenly realised, was sixty-six years old and had become another, other thing with the passage of time.

I lay in the dark, seeing the two of us, not as lovers (after all, we had both had our bits on the side, pretending not to observe) but as people thrown inexorably together, never drifting apart but clinging, each to the other, as refugees. That was what we were, refugees! We played in the world with a sense of joining the fun, but safe in the knowledge that we could disengage and go on to the next group, the next country, the next generation; it was as though we watched the world, paddling like big children in its shallows, but never wholly part of it, then scuttled to our secret privacy where we could gloat over its drab ageing.

Sixty-six years! I thought of Paula as a love object and saw that such a vision had faded and vanished somewhere along the years. Loving her had become a given, not really even a habit, and it was pretty plain that she saw me in the same light and was retreating into her own privacies.

This was more than discovery; it was release. Release into what I could not tell, but the surge of ecstasy, of sudden power, was overwhelming. I had glimpsed a great truth, that I was not just a lucky man with the secret of agelessness, but a man on the lip of the future. My time was not yet, with over-population still beleaguering the planet in its own fecund dross, but I could wait while history rolled by me to at last reveal myself to a more receptive age. Meanwhile I lived on, able to wait for my revelation to come.

(“Shows a nice turn of speech at times, doesn’t he?” the Tracer observed.

“Went to a good school,” said the Supervisor, “but he uses it to show a nasty turn of mind. Having time to think has uncovered the nest of worms.”

“Seems a bit sudden.”

“No, the signs were there in little things. He was isolated on the Arafura; nobody wanted him, and there wasn’t even Paula to talk to, so he had time to meet up with his personal devils. It could have been the first bout of extended thinking in his whole life. Since he was interested in nobody but himself he was able to make it from placidity to paranoia in one jump.”)

The company flew a batch of us home for leave in the fourth week, and I arrived to find Paula in a good mood. Accustomed to her twists and turns (we even made love a couple of times), I didn’t think much about it until on the last day before my return to work she brought up a plan to sell the house.

Why? Because she was lonely among the country hicks (that was understandable) and wanted the city life she was accustomed to. Now that I had a job we could afford a suburban flat and she could find some friends. (Friends? I had to cast back and remember her working-class background. For her it made some sense.) She became insistent, and I couldn’t see much against the idea. But I was never good in arguments; it was only after it was all over that I always thought of the things I should have said. I agreed because she flustered me with her practical view that saw all the advantages and I suppose because I would really rather come home to city life.

At any rate, I agreed and at the week’s end I left behind me the most agreeable and attentive Paula who had manifested in years.

Only on the plane, hurtling north to Arafura, did I begin to wonder just what she had in mind. She was the one who always planned ahead, whereas I just took things as they came; now I wondered what lay behind the idea of a town flat that she hadn’t told me. There had to be something; there was always something.

AFTERWORD

BY JUDITH RAPHAEL BUCKRICH

It is hard not to jump to poignant conclusions about the fact that Turner’s last work was an examination of eternal life, but in fact immortality was an issue he had dealt with in many works. Still there is a sadness about the tone of this work that is new, as is the love that the man has had towards the woman, as he tells of their long and agonising lives. Lives that had begun with wealth and beauty. This in itself is novel for a work by Turner whose male protagonists have often been orphaned or deserted and traumatised and then had to struggle to make of themselves what they could. This is a story of a personal paradise turned to hell by greed and lack of thought.

“It seems incredible that this obvious outcome of our condition had not occurred to us. We had seen ourselves wheeling down the years in a sort of endless laughing carnival, the glittering envy of all, with never a thought of the wrinkling and encroaching frailty of those about us or what their reaction to our eternal youth might be.”

In a way one could stretch the point and see Turner in these poor lost people who have traded their souls for dust. There is something of Dorian Grey here, except that the cruelty is not done by them, but in the end is done to them. After all Turner did have, by his own admission, so many regrets for what he’d done and not done in intimate relationships, all of which he kept separate from his various lives as a respectable writer, critic and friend.

That Turner could write about these feelings is a sign that he was still changing at eighty, that he was having feelings that he’d never felt before, or at least never written about before. One can only stand in awe of the eighty year old changing as the world turned, never standing still, straining for ever new understanding.

Eternity and love and prejudice and decency and superstition, all things that Turner dealt with, wrote about, felt in his bones, and stretched himself to take in and hold in each character in various portion. And all the characters are Turner. For me this last work had the makings of another breakthrough, and like anyone else reading the pages that he managed to complete, I can only see the shadow of what was yet to be written and be utterly frustrated that I will never get to read the rest.

Judith Raphael Buckrich has written a biography of George Turner and a history of St Kilda Road, Melbourne’s Grand Boulevard. She co-edited the first Australian women’s anthology of science fiction and fantasy, She’s Fantastical, which was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and has continued to teach and write feature articles on cultural affairs. Her next major project is a history of Collins Street.

She is the Melbourne president of International PEN.

AFTERWORD

BY BRUCE GILLESPIE

“And Now Doth Time Waste Me” stops at novella length, but obviously George Turner was heading towards a novel-length manuscript when he died in June 1997. Why couldn’t some ambitious writer try to finish it?

The simple answer is that George left no notes to work from. That’s not only because he found handwriting extremely difficult after suffering his first major stroke in 1993. He also left no notes for his earlier, as-yet-unpublished novel. That’s why he was so distressed to find, after recovering from the 1993 stroke, that he could not remember what he had planned for that novel’s second half. He had to reconstruct it from scratch.

I can’t remember George ever describing his working methods in print, but he did describe them in person to some of us from time to time.

The beginning of each novel usually took the form of a short story. In his literary estate is a short-story version called “The Wasting Time”, different enough from this novella version to be interesting to scholars, but not quite self-contained. Many short stories that later grew into novels can be found in his collection A Pursuit of Miracles (Aphelion, 1990).

After writing the short-story seed of his book, often George would throw it away and start again from the beginning. The impression I had from George is that he planned a major part of each novel at that point. He kept the plan in his head. The second draft would be quite long, but George often spoke of getting stuck at the 20,000-word mark.

Each time George became stuck in a novel, he threw away everything he had done and would start again at the beginning. Usually he would write most of the novel during the third draft. Then despair would set in. He would turn up at social gatherings, telling us, “I just can’t get the ending to this book. I don’t know whether I’ll ever finish it”.

George didn’t like writing short stories because he felt the form gave him little scope to develop his characters. He relished the freedom that the 100,000-word novel gave him. In the central sections of a novel he could stretch his characters to their limit. That always left him with the problem: what to do with them at the end? How do you give a conclusion to what is really an ongoing drama?

As we know, George always finished a novel, even if it took him six months of waiting around before he could do it. The exception is “And Now Doth Time Waste Me”. It is the only Turner novel that tells us its end at its beginning. When death forced the abrupt breaking off of this narrative, it would seem to have been flowing inevitably to that ending-in-the-beginning.

Do you believe this? I don’t. Some brilliant ploy would have occurred to George, or probably had done so already. The ending would turn out to be far more ambiguous than it seems. Or George would have gone back to the beginning to change it to fit the second half of the novel. That’s why the version you have just read is so exciting; the reader feels that George still holds most of his cards close to his chest, and has revealed only one or two of them.

George would have loved the idea of keeping everybody guessing long after he had left the party. But it would be interesting to hear writers’ guesses at what George Turner planned for the second half of his last piece of fiction.

Bruce Gillespie, who is George Turner’s Literary Executor, is a Melbourne-based freelance editor and writer who has published SF Commentary since 1969 and The Metaphysical Review since 1984. Many of George’s articles and reviews appeared in these magazines. As a member of the Norstrilia Press partnership, Bruce published George Turner’s The View from the Edge and In the Heart or in the Head.

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